After a dual boot go with ubuntu a friend wants to drop xp and go solely linux. He's somewhat open to the distribution and I'm thinking of setting him up on slack. He just a garden variety user and I just want to set up a stable box and walk away. However he's using an old Dell with about 1.8mhz cpu and 512mb ram.

Does anyone have experience using 13.0 or current on a machine with those specs. He'd be using kde hence my inclination to instal current with kde-4.3.4.

TIA

He barely outclocks my C64

No but seriously 1.8GHz and 512MB of RAM is fine. People are probably still using Pentium Pros and a quarter of that memory on Slackware 13 or current. He may consider getting more memory for KDE though but 512MB will be ok.

Hi justwantin,

I would suspect if stable box is an issue you would be better with the release version 13.0? I am running Slackware 13.0 with xfce on a Dell Latitude D520 which has this processor speed as the machine you mention but I will admit that I upgraded the ram to 2gig.

Andrew

I have Slackware 12.2 on Packard Bell EasyNote with similar specs
and it works very well. I'm confident that 13.0 would work at
least the same.

However if the user is not experienced with
GNU/Linux would be better to install 13.0, not current.

Please define "garden variety."

If by garden variety you mean a non-technical, point-and-click person, he might respond to Slackware like the proverbial deer in the headlights. Stable box, yes, but there is little chance you will be able to walk away. Slackware has no graphical admin tools, no graphical package manager, etc.

If by garden variety you mean he is a distro hopper then Slackware might tickle his fancy.

That is only a basic generality, but use something that caters to your friend's needs and personality, not yours.

I've found 512 mb ram boxes with kde4 do use swap space for web-browsing, word processor, email, IM (the usual daily stuff).

That proc speed is certainly find for kde4.

I've found that I do not use swap if I use XFCE4, or ICEWM for the usual daily stuff fwiw.

I've also found that the "feel" of kde4 (even without compiz) needs a decent video card. You don't necessarily need dri, but an 8mg or 16mg video card even using vesa is sluggish. Again, this is not needed for xfce or icewm.

Good luck

I`m running current Slackware on Dell with 512M RAM and 2GHz clock. It works nice with XFCE. With KDE it sucks but this is due to intel video card which are usually installed on old Dells and the fact that recent intel video drivers for which are extremely unstable and inefficient.

I compared usability of KDE4 on the above machine and an Asus laptop with 512M RAM and slower 1.7GHz clock but with radeon graphic (without binary drivers - just default ati/radeon) and it performed better than my Dell with intel

Thanks everyone.
Nothing fancy, I suppose would do.

This guy introduced me to Borland Turbo C running on DOS in '91, and fiddles around with things like building his own wind turbines, blades, rotor, windings, the lot.

It's not that he's not technical, its just that he can't be bothered. He'll watch dvb, do speadsheets in OO, do banking in firefox, use vbox to run mplab on a virtual windows system. No custom kernels woobbly windows, desktop cubes or myth tv, he's not interested.

He's sick of xp and just wants me to set him up something thats works when he wants to use it but he's smart enough to edit a text file if he's told where and what on the phone or in an email

I'm running -current on a Celeron 850 MHz with 768 MB RAM, it runs very well indeed. My unit functions very well with XFce and Fluxbox. The unit will run KDE 4.3.4 although it does swap a bit. For the unit you described I would recommend XFce as it has a good blend of functionality and it is reasonably light.

A couple of things you could suggest to your friend:
If he wants to use linux, especially Slackware, he will need to do some reading to get the most out of any linux distro. There is simply no way around that. I am "non technical"; but I don't mind reading tutorials. In fact, it has become a bit of a hobby, just to see how much I can learn to do. This is how I learned how to use Slackware.

If he "can't be bothered" set him up with Slackware 13. Current is for people that don't mind being bothered with technical stuff.

Your friend would get better performance by upgrading the RAM to at least 1GB. The 512mb will work though.

I found current to be more stable than 13 proper. At least the previous incarnation before the 2.6.32.2 kernel. That's not to say that this isn't just as stable, just that I've only been current AGAIN for a couple of days with no real chance to test it. I haven't had any issues, so that's a good sign.

I am writing this on a Dell Latitude D505, Pentium M 1.5 GHz, 512 MB RAM, Intel onboard video, running Slackware-current and performance is great save for the RAM which is too small for KDE 4.3.4. Try to upgrade the RAM and you will be fine; otherwise, expect some delays.

My laptop is an IBM A22m Thinkpad: Pentium III-1 GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM. I put a new hard drive in it a while back, which is probably faster than the original, but overall, it's a pretty low-end machine compared to today's monsters.

It runs Slackware 13 -stable with Vincent Batts's KDE 4.3.1 package without any trouble. Performance is just fine.

I think 512mb of ram is a bit shy for KDE. It does run, and runs OK, but with 1gig things move along much better. I have a Dell D600 laptop (1.7 pentium-M, ATI 9000, and 1gig ram) runs -current just fine with newest KDE 4.x. I removed a 512mb stick and rebooted to KDE. Everything still worked, but there was a notable performance hit. I wouldn't run Firefox with 512mb of ram.

We have another old Dell laptop, Inspirion 3800 (PIII 600 384mb ram) runs -current with Xfce and Google-chrome like a champ. And an old HP desktop (Celeron 2.0 512mb RAM) KDE is not fun to use on that system, mainly because of the Intel graphics. 2d screen rendering is even pretty slow. Swapping in an ATI 7000 PCI improves things a little, but not much. If only it had an AGP slot. Another system with a Celeron 2.4/512mb ram and an AGP Nvidia fx5500, runs much better than the HP Celeron. KDE 4 without effects is usable, but Xfce is much better suited for that PC because of the RAM.

1 gig ram, and a good, nothing fancy, graphics card seems to be the sweet spot for KDE 4.

A system that old with a 1.7 CPU is going to have an older Intel chipset. Not really up to the task. If you can swap in a some what decent graphics card, things should be OK. Just be sure to get something better than the ATI 7000 I've got, which is only marginally better than Intel integrated. If there is not an AGP slot, PCI cards are getting somewhat scarce and/or over priced. Though you can get an Nvidia 8400 for ~$40 brand new. Might have better luck at the swap meet, or Ebay.

I ran 12.2 on my dell latitude c400, 1.2GHz, 640M Ram, running 13 on an asus eeepc netbook with a 1.6GHz atom and 1G ram. firefox is a little slow at times since it seems to like using memory a lot but other than that it runs fine even with some big apps like google earth or kphotoalbum or running xp under virtualbox.