Best distro for Compaq Armada M700?
 

Hello, I've just read a few threads here, and I also checked the HCL-list for the laptop and everything seems to be OK.

Anyway, yesterday I installed SuSE 9.3 Pro on the laptop and it works fine with all my hardware, but the distro is pretty slow during the launch of different applications.
So my question is, which distro do you think would work best, and fastest?
If there's no easy way to boost SuSE...


The specs:

Pentium 3 - 500 Mhz
192 MB Ram
ATI Mobility GPU (AGP 2x)
and 10 GB of total disk space.


Greetings :)

Its possible that the slow speeds are down to the specs of the machine.

RAM limitations could be affecting it if your running Gnome or KDE. Possibly choosing a lightweight window manager might help speed things up a bit.

Also check to make sure DMA is activated correctly on the harddrive.

Have a look at http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/compaq.html - there are a few entries against your laptop. I often find useful info on this site.

Yeah, I checked that site, and found that everyone had better specs than mine.

But as okmyx wrote:
Is it very hard to install another window manager than the one that comes with the Distro?
Or if there's any very optimized distro with a lightweight version of one, (perhaps Damn Small Linux?)

I use Slackware (current) on a M700, P III/450 MHz, 256 MB RAM, ATI video card. With fluxbox as windowmanager it is no problem to run all programs in half of the time than SuSE does it ...

I tried SuSE and many other distros, but Slackware and SLAX (Live CD installed on harddisk) are the fastest on the M700 (maybe DSL is an option, but I don't like it, Slackware is easy to configure and stable and all changes in system are possible without problems). You can even run KDE without a problem.

The boot process lasts 40 sec from power-on to graphical mode (fluxbox).

I enjoy this ...

Fluxx.

That sounds very interesting, but I also got a feeling that Gentoo might work, with a kernel compiled especially for my computer. This is a hard choice :)
Atm, I'm reading the Gentoo-docs about installing the OS :)