Performance and Distro's
 

My second computer is an AMD 500Mhz, with only 64mb RAM at the moment, but getting more memory over the weekend, hoping for 256Mb.

I'm not using it for anything really powerfull, just want to run a test server at home for when I'm designing websites. Its much easier than uploading to a host.

The thing is, I understand the PC is very low spec, but I'. just wondering what version of what distro would be best suited to work with this machine? I've put redhat 9 on, but its pretty slow, wil increasing the memory to 1gig make much difference, or will the processor bog it down?

I've tried redhat 7.3, this is quicker, but some things still take there time.

Any advise would be great.

Is anyone else using a similar spec machine?

Believe it or not, that's a rather common question around here :) There are a number of slimmer distros you could try; VectorLinux is good from what I hear (though I've not tried it). Slackware or Debian are very customizable, and should work great with a little tweaking. I'd suggest going with the latest version you can find.

One of the best ways to improve performance, especially with only 64MB RAM, is to run a lightweight window manager like Blackbox, XFCE, or the like, rather than Gnome or KDE.

Had a look at vectorlinux, looks very impressive, takes up roughly 500meg of hd space!!!! Shame though, coz HD space isnt something I am short of. I'll download and install it on one of my HD's.

If your mainly using this machine as a test type server to serve webpages your designing, don't worry about using X on it. You'd only be wasting space and resources unless of course your using this machine for other functions as well maybe needing the GUI.

Regards.

Well, its to help me learn about linux as well, so a gui would be a great advantage.

One thing though, does anyone know if vectorlinux gives the option to install apache and mysql?

Apache is usually pretty standard with just about all distro's. Not sure about mysql but you can always download and install afterwards.. ;)

I've been looking at slackware, would people recommend this?
Does it have its own standard GUI?

Standard GUI? What's that? It comes with KDE, Gnome, Window Maker and many others you can choose from and also choose which one you want default with during installation.

Ok sorry, I didnt realise that the gui was an addition to the os. I'll get used to all this strangeness eventually.

Which do you think will run better

Redhat 7.3 + Blackbox or Slackware 9.0 with blackbox?

I'm just wondering whether its worth installing another distro if redhat will do the job.

Also, if I continue to run redhat, if it runs a little slow and I need it to run slightly quicker, is there anyway to exit the gui, enter text mode, but keep apache and mysql running, then, if I need to, enter the qui again. (similar to dos years ago, where you could exit windows to dos, then by typing 'win' enter windows again?)

Vector is essentially a faster version of Slackware, so you can install any Slackware package on Vector.

I'll give vector a go first, seeing as its only 1 cd, installation doesnt look so simple though. If you cant boot by cd it talks about copying files onto the HD.

Redhat
 

to your question of entering and exiting the gui, the answer is yes. Change the systems default runlevel to 3 (which is command line) Start the GUI by typing "startx"

Alternativley, you can switch between run levels when your are root using the "init" command

init 3 takes you to cli
init 5 takes you to gui


Always running in runlevel 3, and using startx is better in my opionion, because when you change runlevels different services may not be set to start in both if your not careful.

You can trim Slackware down to just about any size you like.

I run it with fluxbox. Pretty snappy.