I'm using a 233MHz P1 with 32MB RAM, and it drives me to seek lighter and lighter software over and over again. Yet some pieces of software, despite being light and everything, still seem to have one quite a memory consuming default attribute: text anti-alias. Having been working all my (no-)life with Windows, I found it very annoying. Not that the smoothness wasn't pretty, but it was also heavy. Of course there are also other factors which make the machine slow, but I'd still appreciate if anti-alias could be totally turned off somehow. I tried to google for solutions, and visited several irc channels in search of help, but none of them knew.

Well how do I know that my machine's just not fast enough? Well, let's take Firefox for example. I have it installed in both Linux Debian and Windows on the very same machine. In Windows, the average time in which the page loads is around 8 seconds. In Debian, the same average goes around 30 seconds. Windows hasn't got anti-aliasing in Firefox, and I think (and hope) it is the mattering factor here. After I found a solution to how to turn anti-aliasing off in X-Chat, the program has ever since been at least a little faster.

So, has someone got experience on how to minimize memory usage in Linux for slow computers? I'll appreciate any help, even if it hasn't got much to do with turning anti-aliasing off.

What window manager are you using? That can speed a computer up quite a bit to have a lite-weight window manager running. By default debian uses metacity, or thats the one I have by default, which is supposed to be a lite-window manager. I've heard there are better ones out there like fluxbox, blackbox and some others. I use metacity on an older computer as well, a total slow piece of junk and it runs smooth and much faster than any M$ did on that machine.

Check this site out for info about window managers and see if one of those may not work better on an older machine.

http://xwinman.org/

Well, I'm using fluxbox on this, so the wm shouldn't be the problem...