Ive just installed a minimal sarge on my old laptop, using the 2.4-586 kernel and fluxbox. It runs decent, but Im wondering if I would notice any speed increse using an older verion of debian? I do use a prism wireless card.

I think you're right to go with fluxbox, KDE or Gnome would way overload that system.

I wouldn't go back to woody. The 2.2 kernel would be a mess, and I doubt you'd see any speed improvement. I think with that processor things will just generally be "slow", but you certainly can shoot for a better interface by stopping all unnecessary processes, and going to the most minimal GUI options within fluxbox.

You also might be well served to check with the damn small linux folks, just to see what they do to get decent performance out of older systems. I have seen people post that they get adequate performance out of older systems, however what is acceptable for one person is obviously not going to be acceptable to all.

Peace,
JimBass

Cool, It took a long time to finally get sarge running properly with a gui, although I learned a lot in the process Im glad I made the right decision using sarge.


I have used dsl in the past and it is a nice distro, I actually used it to install the xf86config file that I had residing in my gmail during the sarge install. The thing i dont like much is that isnt specifically designed for a hd install and the few ready to run packages that are available. I actually like the way fluxbox is setup on dsl though.

The one thing I did notice about dsl is that it only uses about 24 megs of ram with nothing open where sarge uses about 65 megs,since there is only 80 total so I need to bring that down a bit. I suppose I could print out the list of processes running in dsl and try and duplicate it in sarge?.?

Yeah, that is one way to go, although not everything is as clear as something like "apache" would be. By that I mean if you have apache running on any machine, it will be easy to find as apache, but background daemons can run on similiar/different names between distros.

With that in mind, what I would do is take a good look at the /etc/rc2.d directory. Debian boots to runlevel 2 unless you specifically told it to do otherwise, whereas most other distros boot to runlevel 5. That directory is full of symbolic links to /etc/init.d, and anything beginning with the pattern S(number) means start, in the order of numbers ascending from 1 to 100. Anything starting K means kill or don't start.

**WARNING** telling the wrong process not to start will kill your boot. It's one thing if X doesn't start, it's a whole different story when you can't even boot to a login screen. Please don't play with this without a live disk to correct mistakes in starting.

Here is a list of my /etc/rc2.d, and which ones I think I could kill to improve performance.

I would change the S to a K on S20acpid, S20apmd, S20battery-stats, S20cupsys, S20exim4, S20hotkey-setup, S20lpd, S20mbmon, S20sensord, S20smartmontools, S20ssh, S20vsftpd, S20xprint, S21gdm, S21nfs-common, S23ntp, S89anacron, S89atd, S89cron, S91apache2, and S99acpi-support. I think that should still boot, but you won't have printing, cron, or any monitor of your battery stats. The ssh listed there is the server, not the client. If you find you want any of these running, you can start/kill it through /etc/init.d/command start|stop.

Again, I'd check what something does before killing it, but if you don't need it, try removing it and getting your memory footprint down.

Peace,
JimBass

Thanks for the startup information, this really helps shed some light on my understanding about how the startup process works. Im looking forward to finding how much ram I can free up now

Yeah, for most people there's a lot of stuff than can be stripped away.
Here's a shot of my somewhat streamlined Etch fresh after a reboot:
www.joskus.jossain.com/shot.png

honestly you could run any distro you want on that thing as long as you keep the wm and the apps simple n small.

I have to hand it to the dsl guys, I dont think I can get it running as light and lean as they do, they even have Icons and a system monitor running. Even after uninstalling anything I could find that wasnt nessesary and editing the startup untill I had only about 4-5 things in there Im still at approximately 60 megs of memory used. I really dont know how I would get it down to the 25 megs that dsl uses and still be useable.