[ale] Best Choice for under-powered System

[Byron A Jeff]

On Sun, Sep 28, 2003 at 05:52:09PM -0400, John M Trostel wrote:
> I've cobbled together a system for my son from an old 100 MHz Pentium
> (I) wt. 64 MB of RAM.... 4 M of that RAM is used by the on-board SIS
> video chip.  It's got a whopping 1 GB HDD, a cd drive and a 3.5"
> floopy.  An old SMC 10BT ethernet card rounds out his $0 cost system. 
> (Actually $5, as I needed a PS2/AT keyboard converter dongle.)
> 
> Right now I have the system running RH 7.1. Do you realize how many
> upgrades there are out for the stock 7.1 distro now? ;)
> 
> He needs a system that will run Netscape/Mozilla/Galeon with Java
> support.  It barely runs on the system set up now.  (Mozilla and Java). 
> Would I be better off running Debian on this box? (Leaner, meaner, 
> slightly less than glacial...) Or even something like Vector Linux,
> which is supposedly for just such a situation? The ISO of Vector I
> burned seems to have trouble... Has anyone else tried Vector or another
> small distro for old machines that includes X, a nice windowing system,
> and a java-enabled browser?

You have a couple of hardware issues. First and foremost is the RAM. You'll 
definitely swap in 60MB with almost any X setup. And disk is several orders
of magnitude slower than RAM. So if nothing else double or quadriple the
amount of RAM you have. Does the board take 168 DIMMs.

The second one is simply the fact that 100 Mhz is older than dirt and slower
than molassas. Nothing short of an upgrade is going to fix that.

Sometimes it's worth investing some money simply not to deal with the hassle.
For example here's a Duron 700 Mhz on a mostly integrated MB (no video):

http://www.softwareandstuff.com/mb_sk7d700.html

for $35. Throw in a $3 realtek NIC and a $8 PCI video. And you're in business.

Just a thought.

BAJ