The need for speed
 

No I'm not talking about the computer game, drugs or driving through the suburban streets at 80 miles an hour.

I'm talking about getting Mandrake Linux 8.0. To run as quick (with good stability, of course) as possible below are the needs, wants and machine's specs:

NEEDS:
- X Windows (not all the time though, probably 80% of the time)
- IPTables
- Portsentry (Intrusion detection).
- A web browser either Mozilla or Galeon.
- Staroffice 5.2 or 6.0 beta, final (when it's released)
- Any other services require access the Internet securely

WANTS:
- KDE 2.1.x or later, or Gnome 1.2.x or later
- XMMS 1.2.x (playing MP3s)
- Video playing (MPEG1 & 2, MOV, etc) with some speed (not playing vids at the same as playing MP3s though)

SPECS:
- AMD K6/2 400
- 4 MB ATI Rage Mobility M
- 32 MB RAM
- A slow 4 GB Hard Drive (I think the controller is only capable of UDMA Mode 4)

Get slack and start recompiling all your software from source with arch optimisations, starting with the kernel.

You can do the same with a Mandrake distribution. Kinda beats the idea of Mandrake with the ease of install thingy. But just install a very minimal system with compiler (since mandrake doesn't see that as necessary on a normal install). Then start by stripping and recompiling the kernel.
A lot of programs can be optimized after that. Fast machine with KDE/GNOME and only 32MB of ram don't really all fit in the same sentence. I think you should try one of the lighter window managers.
And even though StarOffice 6 is still beta it's still a LOT faster then 5.2.

About recompling the kernel; could someone recommend an easy way to do that.

Can anyone mention some window managers/desktop environments are less resource hungury than KDE or Gnome. But also have decent control of the interface and stability.

There is no easy way to recompile the kernel. It takes a lot of reading. First of all read the following howto:
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Kernel-HOWTO.html

Most kernel options have pretty good explanations on what they do. So just read up on each option and find out whether you need it or not, if your not sure then just leave it at what it is. It's better to try recompiling a few times before you get the optimal kernel then just disabling things right and left and finding out later it just won't boot.

go with XFCE at www.xfce.org i use it and love it.. small and fast, doesn't waste too much resources..

Re: The need for speed
 

First off, nice Top Gun quote. Your machine rocks, and will rock running Linux for at least another 2-3 years, but look at the RAM man... 32 Megs! eeps. If you pick up a 128 stick (and knowing the age of the average mobo for a K6/2 we're talking pc100 SDRAM), you don't have to tweak any of the software, nothing, and you will quintuple your performance. No matter how much you slim down the kernel, knock out the extra Mandrake drudgeware in the background, XFree4.0.3 which that machine is running is going to be sucking down %50 of that 32 Megs. This, depending on whether you buy stuff online, live next to a college, or only buy CompUSA bang me in the pocketbook retail, is only a $15-$40 problem. RAM is Cheap!

Make sure that my guess on the bus speed of the RAM was right though by checking the info on your mobo.

Cheers,

Finegan

finegan has a good point, I should have looked a bit closer to your machine specs, pc133 sdram will work in a motherboard that only supports up to pc100, it just means that you'll be running it under spec.


[edit] speelng

ewwww a new version of CDE? yuck! well, aesthetically at least. I installed that once, and it totally ballsed up gnome, as it forced a gtk standard, which gnome wasn't able to override, as it does things properly... i think it's the only other gtk based wm i've seen tho. more would be a good thing.

till then, blackbox is the prettiest / fastest wm as far as i care.

but yeah.. that RAM thing...

I don't mind IceWM as a lightweight window manager.....

However as RAM is really cheap atm, 128 or 256MB extra would make a large difference in performance at a low price...

Re: Re: The need for speed
 

This machine is laptop, I don't really know about the prices for RAM on laptops (probably 2-3 times the amount for desktops). By the way I'm just experimenting with the performance of Linux on those specs.