Low-end machine, lightweight applications and some other stuff
Submitted by toshiba on Sunday 14th of January 2007 09:31:15 AM
I had an old Toshiba PII 266 Mhz (I think), 4 GB HD, 32 Mb RAM preinstalled with windows 95 lying around, and I thought it with be fun to mess around with it a bit. It don't even have a network card, and it has never been on the internet. I've been into linux for a little less than a year, and I'm not yet a command line guru, but partitioning, installing and so forth usually works out.
Given the low specs of my toshiba box, I figured I needed to use either a distro with a text based installer or a distro with a very lightweight window manager, such as fluxbox. Most distros seem to have moved away from the text based installers, but the slackware derivates stick by it, so my initial attemtp was with Zenwalk. It installed fine, and seemed a decent distro. Unfortunately, xcfe was a tad on the heavy side for this old laptop, and performance was very slow.
My next attempt was with puppy linux. This was able to run as a live CD, although not very well. I could not get the hard drive installer to work properly, though, and not only could it not install puppy, for a while it seemed it had corrupted the hard drive in some way. All of a sudden no distros would work. A re-installation of Zenwalk failed. As did attempts with Windows 95, Feather, DesktopBSD, Austrumi, ReactOS, FreeDos, Minix 3, Slax, Dynebolic and propably one or two others I can't remember. As a result I sort of gave up, and forgot about it all for a while.
That was until I happend to see on Distrowatch that a new edition of Damn Small Linux was out. Since it was a quick download at 50 MB, I decided to give it a shot, and, he-heyyy, it worked! Guess my hard drive wasn't corrupted after all! DSL installed fine, and that's not all: Just for fun, I tried to connect my Toshiba to my cable modem with a USB-cable (this laptop has one USB-slot), and to my own huge surprise, all of a sudden I was on the internet. Oh joy!
DSL is a fine distro, especially when you consider how many functions have been crammed into so little space. Speed was satisfactory, although firefox was very slow. As an installed OS, however, I found DSL a bit limited, so I hoped that, now that I had internet and DSL is Debian-based, I could extend it a bit, using apt-get. Unfortunately, though, I could not get this to work, and I actually didn't find the DSL forums very helpful either. Had I been a bit more patient or persistent, I could perhaps made it, but I decided, instead, to look for another distro.
But which distro? There are certainly enough to choose from! I browsed the top 100 list at Distrowatch for distro that suited my needs: A text-based installer, and the possibility to choose some other desktop enviroment than Gnome, KDE or Xfce. There were a couple of candidates, but I only got to try out one, since that one turned out to be a stayer: Vector Linux.
At first I actually went for 5.1 instead of recent release 5.8, because it offered a better choice of lightweight window-managers during installation. I installed it successfully with IceWM, in my opinion by far the best lightweight WM, only to find out that my internet-connection was not auto-configured. Neither did I manage to get it to work with the network tools that were present ( I am, mind you, extremly helpless when it comes to internet connections).
So I turned to 5.8 instead. It installed with Xfce, and this time I succeeded in getting on the net. And using the package manager (it needed maybe 5-10 minutes to load when usin Xfce), I managed to install IceWM. I logged in anew with Ice, and things were starting to look good.
Vector comes with Firefox, Opera, Seamonkey, Dillo and Lynx, so there are some browsers to choose from. Firefox and Seamonkey was useless due to their memory usage, so I removed them. I keep Opera around, but it too is rather sluggish, so I use Dillo as much as I can. I also installed Links2, which is fast, and usable for pure text, such as Wikipedia.
Vector's package manager is Gslapt, and I think it's really great. Adding repositories is as easy as choosing from a list, and all dependencies are handled adequately. Adding and removing programs is no problem, and the graphical interface is intuitive.
After some fiddling with Gslapt, I now have a complete stack of applications that work well on my eight years old laptop: Abiword and gnumeric as office-tools are pre-intalled. As is Gaim, Opera, Dillo, xmms, mplayer and Xchat. I added the fast and elegant Sylpheed for mail and Gtk-gnutella for file-sharing (it's excellent). I removed some games that was to heavy to run, and as well as Vim and bluefish, as I'll never use them.
My old laptop now has almost all the functions one needs from a modern computer, and heck, it even looks good, with a red and yellow IceWM motif. I dig it! I actually find myself spending more time with it these days, than with my new acer with PCLinuxOS/XP. Vector is superb, though you would expekt that a distro who aims to be rather lightweight would have a home page that renders correctly in a lightweight-browser such as dillo.
»
-
- toshiba's blog
- Login or register to post comments
Printer-friendly version- 10236 reads
PDF version
More in Tux Machines
- Highlights
- Front Page
- Latest Headlines
- Archive
- Recent comments
- All-Time Popular Stories
- Hot Topics
- New Members
digiKam 7.7.0 is released
After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release.
|
Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand
|
Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech
The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world.
Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility.
|
today's howtos
|
.svg_.png)
Content (where original) is available under CC-BY-SA, copyrighted by original author/s.
Vector 5.8 = very good lightweight distro
I agree Vector 5.8 is really nice distribution based on Slackware 11.0. I'm running it on my two machines: Duron 850 MHz on Elitegroup K7SEM motherboard with integrated audio,video and NIC built around SiS chipset where it's blazing fast and on (unknown) P I 266 MHz with only 64 Mb SDRAM where it replaced Slackware 10.
I found latest Vector Linux release to be very suitable for day-to-day WEB browsing, email, watching movie trailers ( mostly from www.apple.com/trailers since with Mplayer plugin for brilliant Seamonkey browser I can SAVE movie streams to my hard-disk. Try that with Apple QuickTime !!! )
With Industrial theme and Deja Vu sans 9 bold fonts it is sharp looking distro couple people asked already if I can install it on their abandoned ( Pentium II generation) computers.