best config for limited resources
 

I have a laptop with a 600mhz CPU and 96mb of RAM and a RAGE Mobility AGP 2X video card.

Given these reasonably limited resources, I am trying to decide on the best distribution and windowing system to run in order to get the best performance.

I am currently running red hat 9 with kde 3, but this combo is out performed by w2k, a travesty i know.

Can you suggest a configuration (distro, gui, anything else) that will run smoothly?

Thanks,

Toby

That's not that bad really. You could stick with your current distro, just drop back to a different window manager:
windowmaker
OpenBox
FluxBox
BlackBox
TWM ( :D )
XFCE
SawFish

Any of those should run amazingly faster. If you really wanna switch distros, Look at something lighter. If you are fairly confident with Linux, maybe Debian, Slackware, or ArchLinux will be worth looking into.

Cool

more qs
 

Thanks for your reply. I take it by the smily face that you recommend twm, if this is correct, can you tell me why? Is there any doco on how to remove kde and install twm without affecting anything else?

im having some problems with the power standby and the network support under red hat, so i am going to give another distro a spin. Are there any major speed differences between distros? ie does turbo linux live up to its name?

Thanks again

Toby

Never using Turbo Linux, I cannot comment, however, yes, some distros are, out of the box, faster. But any distro can be tweaked to perform better than another, it's all in the user.

And no, I don't recommend TWM, that was more of a "huh huh, not really" smiley ;) TWM is the most basic windowmanager there is. I believe it's put out by XFree86. It's T=The W=Window M=Manager. And really, that's it. Very basic. Not user friendly really, but hey, it works if you wanna use it.

Cool

Red Hat has a NEtwork Administration Tool or neat for short. You can access from KDE of GNOME menu or just type
neat
in a terminal window
There you can find what services you have running at startup. Turn off the ones you know you don't need. It will make your machine run much better.

however, yes, some distros are, out of the box, faster.
Show me some stats, C.

thx
 

Thanks for your suggestion, I have infact turned off all unnecessary services, and there was a substantial difference after this.

Will my redhat install already come with a window manager installed that i can use without loading up KDE? Like IceWM perhaps?

Is there much of a performance difference between KDE and GNOME?

http://www.icewm.org
you can download an rpm

On Red Hat 7.2 GNOME is faster that KDE. I imagine the same is true for the latest versions. Maybe someone else has more experience with them.

I have downloaded and installed FVWM. I have set my DISPLAY var to :0.0. When i attempt to run fvwm, it says X must be running, so i start X with startx. X launches, but starts KDE.

I can now run fvwm, but KDE is still running, which negates my whole reason for installing fvwm. Is there any way i can run X, but not have KDE start up?

Am i missing something here? does KDE have to be running? im kinda confused about the window maker / desktop distinction

Any suggestions on anything else im doing wrong?

Thanks

aha! i found the xinit cmd.

all is good.

thanks to all that made suggestions.

:D

I should eventually build something I guess...

I've seen dramatic increases in several areas of my system when switching from Mandrake to Slackware, dead stock. Also seen a bit of speed increase when using a dead stock LFS compared to even Slackware. I can just say "I've seen" because I didn't/don't run benchmarks on my systems. But it was definitely noticeable ;) Applications would load faster, the cursor would blink as if system resources were 'low' on Mandrake, however even in KDE on slack, it would run smoothly. I blame over half the lack of performance on 'services' but regardless, they were there OOB (out of box) and weren't there OOB on slack ;)

Cool

hehe, just reading through this post, I have somewhere on this forum seen TWM described as "pure, unadulterated X - with a terminal to run things from". I think that is indeed an apt description. As for some distros being faster, I must say that I have noticed a performance difference between my laptop running Slack, and my laptop running Debian. However, that's probably more to do with the initial configuration [slackware loads minimal services] than the actual distro.

Vector Linux is fast - JAMD is meant to be good to.

You can check out all the major Linux distributions and more at Distrowatch : You might find something suitable here.

Click here to go to Distrowatch

Ive just recently found Gentoo and I love it very much. Definately not for the newbs though.