Hi

I have borrowed a Compaq Pressario 1200, which has an AMD 450Mhz and 32 MB Ram under the hood. It currently has Win98 installed, but in the move away from Win, I want to run Linux on the laptop as well as on my desktop at home.

I know that with 32 mb of ram I cannot run KDE og GNOME at full speed, but is it enough for running Window Maker ? I mainly use the laptop for webdesign and want to do this on Linux. I also prepare for an LPI certification and want to do some console practise on the laptop.

Thanks

any of the major distros should work fine, but you will have to go with a very minimalistic window manager and at 32mb, your performance may very well be a bit sketchy for my liking. I'd suggest spending a few bucks on some ram, and then you can run whatever you want.

I agree with ezra143 - get some more RAM. I use a 366MHz laptop, but with my 192 megs of RAM I can run Gnome 2.4 and 2.5 pretty well...although I don't. I alternate between Xfce4 and Fluxbox instead since they provide much better performance on this hardware.

Håkan

Actually, im running KDE 3.1 and multi-tasking like a pro with a PII450MHz and 256 of ram. This box wont quit.....

Hi

Thanks for your replies, I think I will go for a ram upgrade, though 256 MB ram will not be the case as this laptop only supports up till 128 MB of PC100 SDRAM

128 with a decent window manager will be a nice setup, KDE may be a bit dodgey for regular multi-tasking, but you can certainly give it a try... I would.

You definitely need to get more ram. I ran SuSE with KDE on a 466MHz Celeron and 96 MB of ram for several years on a laptop and was fairly happy with it. I'm running the same distro with 256MB (on a desktop now since 96MB was the max for that laptop) and performance is much better. So I'd max out the laptop (memory wise) ASAP.

I agree totally with the RAM upgrade....I've been running
Mandrake (currently 9.1) with 128 meg and KDE running
farily well..

However I think I would first try Knoppix from a CD, to
see if it would detect all my hardware. And then you would
at least have an idea if you'd need to find any special drivers.

Just a thought

A friend of mine has the same machine. 14 minute boot time. Defragged, got it down to ~9
minutes. Turned off autoload of Office, etc, got it down to 6 minutes. It takes over 3 minutes to spawn IE or Netscape. So even with KDE, the performance really can't get any worse. She boots up, has breakfast, starts Netscape, gets a coffee, start office while reading mail. 4-8 minutes later, Office comes up. I can't imagine this was the speed at new, but I don't know what else to try. The bottom line though, install KDE with all the eye candy, autoload OpenOffice and it can't be any slower that Windows. Even Quicken guis take about 30 seconds to completely load when the tab opens.

For the poster, try linux http://www.linux-laptop.net/, they have many 1200 and the like experiences posted.

I would dual boot the machine for her except ~2.5 of the 6 gig HD has the OS backup. It didn't come with any disks. Now, can anyone tell me how stupid it is to backup an OS on the HD that will need repair when it it fails. (Makes the normal OS reinstals easy though :-) )

R.O.

I've been really successful with Mandrake 9.2 which works really well for as a hardware acid test. The install either goes flawlessly or if it bonks, just try another distro. I use IceWM on a 128MB machine and I've got 75MB RAM free and the interface response is near instantaneous.