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Old 05-09-2004, 09:01 AM   #1
wrat
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another which distro? with a twist


just scavenged an old presario 4770 p200 with a whopping 48mg memory 4gig hd and an on-board s3 vid chip..it had w98 on it and would run it although WAY slow..so im looking for a NON debian based distro to try on it with a minimal gui like flux box or?? I tried damn small linux just to see how it would run and it was fine..the slackware live cd says it needs 64 mg mem so its out..no mandrake or redhat either..so ideas??
thanx
 
Old 05-09-2004, 10:11 AM   #2
Pres
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Slackware live might suggest 64MB, but just installing slack onto the hdd, you don't need anything like that much. Slackware 9.1 would run on that box.
 
Old 05-09-2004, 11:30 AM   #3
pave_spectre
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Slack should definitely run on that.
I had slack running briefly on a 133 with 32 meg ram and 2gig disk and it didnt have a problem, till I needed to scrounge it for my smoothwall.
 
Old 05-09-2004, 10:32 PM   #4
vectordrake
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Every distro that allows you to choose what you install will be fine. DSL is Debian under the hood, by the way. Since Debian, Mandrake, Red Hat/Fedora, Suse, Slackware, Gentoo, and 1000s of others do give you a choice of what to install, you can use anything you want. If you want a distro that's gonna be a bit faster on your particular machine, I'd try one that is already pentium optimized (i586 instead of i386) like Mandrake. If you really want to do it from the ground up, install just the base system (of whatever distro you choose) and then add to it as you want.

A hint: If you want an "X" install and you want it to start up graphically, choose XDM over KDM or GDM as your Desktop manager, as its much lighter. The easiest light window managers to configure (as in add to the menu, icons, etc) seem to be Windowmaker and XFCE4, IMO. If you want pure speed, Fluxbox is hard to beat (unless you go with Debian with UWM - that's SUPER fast, but wierd).

What usually slows down your computer the most is the number of services you run and the amount of eye candy on your desktop. Good luck.
 
Old 05-09-2004, 10:38 PM   #5
mijenks
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Maybe it's too complicated, but . . .

I would bet that you could get Gentoo to run the fastest. Seeing as everything is (necessarily) compiled on your machine. Maybe Gentoo will prove to be too difficult and not worth it, but if I weren't such a clueless noob, I'd be running Gentoo on it. Of course I've never actually used Gentoo, or even tried to compile anything from source, but . . . it's worth a shot.

Sidenote: I actually am going to run Gentoo on an old machine this summer. Or at least die trying. Or come close to dying. Or not really. But still, try.
 
Old 05-09-2004, 10:54 PM   #6
Mega Man X
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Gentoo in an older machine?. That could take a couple of years to compile things . By the time you are done that machine would be even more dated, lol.
 
Old 05-09-2004, 10:55 PM   #7
haimeltjnfg
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debian :P
 
Old 05-09-2004, 11:08 PM   #8
wrat
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well I had mandrake8.0 so I loaded that with minimal apps and fluxbox for a wm and is slower than running damn small from the cd I also have vector 3.0 but that refuses to boot into x
well actually it doesnt refuse it just turns the screen into funny lines and then goes black so..
I knew damn small was debian I just wanted to see if it would run and it was pretty damn fast may just load that although since I have debian on the main box I was looking for something else
 
Old 05-09-2004, 11:29 PM   #9
vectordrake
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Try Slackware or put FreeBSD on it (that'll be your fastest and most powerful option, I bet). Your Vector problem sounds like a mismatch of monitor refresh rates. If you ctrl+alt+backspace, can you get out of X (if you do it 3 or 4 times to kill it)? Or, go to terminal 2 and edit your xf86config file. Look for horizontal sync and vertical refresh. Often the range chosen for the install is a bit out of whack. My KDS Visual Sensations monitor (a cheap workstation 17" found everywhere) works with 30-70 horiz and 50-160 vert. Check the color depth/resolution as well in the Screen section. Be sure that if your monitor/vid card can't do 1024x768, that it isn't the first in the list and if 24 bit color isn't possible, change it. Vector is a nice stripped version of Slack (see my name...I had it installed at the time).
 
Old 05-10-2004, 01:04 AM   #10
wrat
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yeah I figured it was a monitor/refresh thing but I ve edited xf86 3 times with the right settings for my vid chip and monitor and same error over and over what veersion of slack could be rin with above pc using a lightweight wm like fluxbox?? dont know anything about fbsd
 
Old 05-10-2004, 02:31 AM   #11
John5788
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i second freebsd, it runs awesome on old hardware.
 
Old 05-10-2004, 05:35 AM   #12
Mara
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Quote:
Originally posted by wrat
yeah I figured it was a monitor/refresh thing but I ve edited xf86 3 times with the right settings for my vid chip and monitor and same error over and over
Look at X messages when you kill it (on the console it was strated from or /var/log/XFree86.log.0 file). Error messages should tell you something, if not, post them here.

Quote:
what veersion of slack could be rin with above pc using a lightweight wm like fluxbox??
Any version. Just to have new libraries versions (what may be useful) install a new one.
 
Old 05-10-2004, 07:54 AM   #13
wrat
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no error message cause screen goes black and have to reboot or if I use cntrl alt f2 and start a new term whats the error log path??
 
Old 05-10-2004, 08:06 AM   #14
vectordrake
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/var/log/XFree86.0.log on mine

It'll likely be a longish file, so pipe it through a pager like less, more, or most. You may need to be root to read the file.
 
  


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