On a sheer whim I installed Scientific Linux 5.4. I have an old test box I like to experiment on. I was amazed at the speed and responsiveness of the system.

The test system uses an old Trident chipset which works superb with this installation.

Specifically, Gnome in it's older rendition runs very responsive. The 2.6.18 kernel with it's backports and such impresses. I know it's Redhat recompiled but still I wish many other distributions would stop trying to include the most up to date software.


At anyrate, if you haven't tried it do so.

P3 1.1Ghz Celeron / 384MB ram

So I wonder if that is because SL did optimization or a result of the underlying RHEL sources? Did you compare it to CentOS which is also compiled from RHEL sources.

Hi

I have also just installed SL on my laptop (needed to install BCM drivers from Yum Extender so that wifi would work). Seems responsive and might be very useful for older systems. I have not used Centos for over 12 months but SL seems to work better out of the box, for example, flash is installed.

One problem though (which I had with Centos also) - that is:- cant play dvds; libdvdcss2 available from Yum Extender (package manager) but not win32 codecs. VLC wont install due to dependency issues. Does any one have any ideas?

Many thanks.

For multimedia support for SL and CentOS see here:
http://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/MultimediaOnCentOS