Mandrake 9.1 on an older Pentium II

teal · 08-23-2003, 09:31 AM

I currently have Mandrake running on my AMD 1800+ system. It runs beaultifully with minor things i still need to figure out.

but here's my question...

I have another computher which is a:
Pentium II 400 Mhz.

Will Mandrake run fine on this older system?
If not what is the distro of choice for older systems?

david_ross · 08-23-2003, 09:45 AM

IT should run fine. The more ram you have the better though if you want a reasonable GUI environment. If you don;t want to run X then it should be mroe than fine.

wimva · 08-23-2003, 10:58 AM

I'm using Mandrake 9.1 on a pentium II 400 Mhz, works fine for me. a bit slow when booting , and don't expect it to be superfast ofcourse...

tripolitan · 08-23-2003, 12:50 PM

I have Mandrake 9.1 running on first generation Pentium 166MHZ with 64MB RAM. Not much GUI but great home file server. I also have Redhat 9.0 running on Pentium 133MHZ Laptop, in text mode/X with very minimal WM and minimal apps.

Skyline · 08-23-2003, 04:39 PM

Using Mandrake with a lighter Window Manager like IceWm might help a little on a lower specs machine.

There might be other suitable distros at Distrowatch.

Click here to go to Distrowatch

And for Window Managers:

http://www.plig.org/xwinman/

teal · 08-23-2003, 07:30 PM

Thanks a lot everyone.

ytene · 08-25-2003, 06:22 AM

I have L-M9.1 running on an older machine, in this case a dual-processor PII-450. A couple of things have helped me get good performance from this configuration, but they are not all easy to implement:-

1. Lots of RAM. I run this with 1Gb and this seems to help quite a bit.

2. Sensible use of disc. How many hard drives do you have available for this distro? Older PII machines seemed to have EIDE ATA-33 disco controllers [rarely anything faster] and as a result discs are relatively slow. If your Mobo uses ATA-33, consider using 2 hard drives, on different channels [different cables] and carefully spread your partitions across them. [*Warning, to minimise hard drive failure impact, make sure you use Ext3 or ReiserFS, both of which are journaled file systems. Won't stop a crash, will minimise damage].

3. Use the right software. Easiest to implement. Simple, don't run KDE. It's too big and bloated for older CPUs. At install, try a selection of X environments and experiment. To compare memory footprint, in each desktop, open a shell window and type "top" and look at the memory usage at the top of the returned display...

Hope this helps