P2 machine with slackware
 

Hi all,

I have a p-II machine now and I wonder is it good for me to install slackware 10 on it. And I have no idea how to use the P-II machine. I am thinking of using it for experiments. :D
Any suggestion?

My PC Configuration:
PII 350Mhz (Slot 1)
160MB Ram
6.4 + 3.2 GB HDD
10/100 ethernet card
msi ms-6390E motherboard

I just did a Slack 10 install on my P2 333. system and it runs well. I had no problems what so ever

I installed Slack 10 on an AMD K6-475Mhz with 320MB of RAM and on a PII-266Mhz with 256MB of RAM. Both machines runs GREAT with KDE. I would HIGHLY suggest Slack for anyone with a 200Mhz+ machine.

but I only got 160mb for the machine. Is it still sufficient to run KDE? or I should use other windows manager?

And anyone could tell me how can I use the p2 machine. I have no idea.

any suggestion is welcome ;)

I have a thinkpad 570 pII 366+192M RAM, and installs slackware-current. I have tried to use gnome,blackbox,xfce,fluxbox,fvwm95,now I select blackbox as my window manager.these window managers can run perfectly.

But if I run openoffice,it will not give me a response for a long time.

I think 160MB should be sufficient. I believe KDE recommends 128MB of RAM, but it function with less. (Please correct me if I am wrong) I recently ran Slack 10 with KDE 3.2 with only 64MB of RAM and it ran pretty well. Sure, it had to use the swap partition more, but the speed wasn't terrible. With that being said, I doubt OpenOffice would have been adequate with such little memory. The moral of the story is, 160MB should be fine.

i have Slack 10 running successfully on a PI 233MMX with 192 mb of RAM. KDE will run, but it is slow, so i use fluxbox and/or IceWM. You can definitely run Slack 10 on the box you described. As for KDE, give it a try and see if it is tolerable or not.

The older computer I have slack 10 on runs kde a little slow but it only has 64 meg and a 512 swap. But it still works

Make it a server. web, email, ftp, samba ...etc.


That's what I did with the pII I had laying around. This guy has an awesome tutorial for setting up a Slackware box,. Go here and/or here for the details.

A machine of these specifications will run Slackware just fine, and that includes using KDE and installing OpenOffice. The questions are, what will you use it for, and are you obsessed with "performance?"

If you are looking for basic word processing, email, web surfing, spread sheets, etc., and you don't get in a sweat when an application takes a while to load, you'll be happy with it. This is basically an "office productivity" workstation and it is adequate.

If you are looking for a machine to experiment with, and to learn about Slackware (and Linux in general), again, it will be fine. You'll learn, and you just need to remember that a P4 with a GB or two of RAM is supposed to be faster.

If you are a "power user" you aren't going to like it, and you aren't going to like it for gaming, running VMWare, video production, etc.

But one thing that people regularly overlook when they focus on processor speed and RAM is disk I/O. Load up Slackware on this box and then run hdparm to optimize your disk read/write speeds. That old PII might compare very favorably to a much faster machine configured the way most people leave them -- with the hard drive transferring data to/from the bus at about half the speed it is capable of.

Also, you will get arguments over whether or not a custom compiled kernel will help with a PII and 160 MB. Obviously it won't improve performance like it does on a 486 with 16 MB RAM. But I do think a very lean, monolithic kernel, compiled for the specific processor helps -- although it is a tiny fraction of the performance boost hdparm provides in many cases. I have picked up improvements in I/O of as much as 30MB/second on PIII's, and 10~20 MB/second on machines like yours with hdparm.

Wait a minute, I have a Pentium 133MHz, with 96 MB of ram, and Slackware 9.1 works on it without any problem. :D

KDE may be really slow on your machine, but you can always try XFCE (my first choice) or fluxbox as a graphical interface.

You young punks with you newfnagled toys... ;)

lol! I just think KDE is bit bloated, I haven't the fastest PC on the block (1.3Ghz) but it runs fluxbox absolutely great.
XFCE is gorgeous by default, but I left it because of the memory problems in X.org and ATi drivers - if I ran XFCE,
I couldn't watch TV, whereas with fluxbox I could. I may go back to XFCE, but I've only just got fluxbox custom'ed to my
needs. From the time I spent on XFCE, it didn't seem that modifiable - stuff was generally as it was and it didn't appear
possible to change it - when I go back I'll have to investigate this :)