Wondering if anyone can tell me if I am more likely to get better "performance" out of an old p100 laptop with 16 megs of ram using the lowmem.i kernel as opposed to bare.i.

I have the thing up and running Slack 8.1 using bare.i, but I would go through the whole thing again if I knew it would run better using lowmem.i.

On a related note, is Fluxbox easier on system resources than Window Maker? Ahh, the joys of low end computing...


Thanks

bare.i! Lowmem is for systems with very low memory (The Slackware HOWTO says 8MB or less) The <kernel>.i's are for installing Slackware ONLY. It's highly suggested that you recompile your kernel after a Slackware install. If you're very new to Linux, Learning how to compile a kernel is a very good first project. You need to know the specifics of your computer's hardware, though. Not nessicarily io addresses and IRQ's, but which drivers work for which hardware you have. Included with the kernel source is an INSTALL file that'll tell you what you need to know about compiling and installing a kernel. The kernel source is included on the slackware CD under the K disk set.

Back in my 486 days, I used enlightenment and.. nextstep? It's been a while, and by now, would probably impractical to use on an older machine. Blackbox is a relatively small GUI. I'd look into that one if you're looking for a small, faster running GUI. Perhaps others have other suggestions to add?

Personally, I run Window Maker on any box I put linux on, just because it's small, and fast, and I only use GUI's for certain functions. (Surfing Porn, and other important stuff like that. ;)

Hope this helps. Also, http://www.freshmeat.net is a good place to find software packages or links to them (Like Blackbox) if you haven't discovered it already.

Out.

If you have a GUI working at all on 16 MB RAM you have done well.
If it wouldn't eat up your entire hard drive you could always go for the 64 MB swap file.

Thanks for the lengthy reply Blindsight!

I am pretty much a newb, but I suppose I can give a kernel recompile a shot. I can only imagine how many days it will take...

I suppose it defeats the purpose to use make oldconfig when compiling? I have never even seen what menuconfig looks like, but I don't necessarily need to yet (unless of course I need to...).

Thanks again for the advice, I now know more and that is always a good thing!

(oh, and Fluxbox is a fork of Blackbox that they use on the slackware-live cd when you use the guifast option

That's not true at all. GUIs have been around since 16MBs of RAM cost you a paycheck or two.

I disagree, current *nix GUIs eat RAM like candy. What has been around since the begining of time hardly matters.
I stand by my original comment.

Read your quote again. You were suggesting it was nearly impossible to run a GUI at all on 16MB of RAM. It's common sense that, by today's standards, you'll have a problem running most *current* GUIs with RAM you can buy on price watch for 14 dollars (EDO). Such is the flow of technology. It's ignorant to suggest you aren't able to run a GUI at all.

There's a reason why they still supply slackware 4.0 and even older distributions. They wouldn't keep them archived if people didn't use them. So it's purely opinion that these versions "hardly matter".

...that there are no current distros that do this by default and that yph30 has done well getting it running no matter if by tweaking or getting an older distro to run. Other posts to this bulletin board suggest that not everyone can do this.

Just to give you an idea of what you're in for, configuring the kernel compile took me ages but the compiling itself took less than 8 hours on my P100. (I dunno, exactly - I feel asleep both times and it was done when I woke up.)

And ZipSlack from Slack9 run fluxbox and X on the P100 with 32 MB RAM and a 64*K* swapfile, using something like 14 MB, less shared/buffered - as long as all I do is use mc, joe, rxvt, and fluxbox, etc. So you should be able to get a GUI in there. Just have to make some more swap and run *really* light. See about w3m (console) or dillo (gui) maybe if you want to surf.

If you run lowmem.i, then you will free up a little more memory, but some of the kernel features will be missing, so the tradeoff is probably not worth it if you are running more than 8MB of RAM.

I think to say that the kernels that come with Slackware are for installation only is a bit too strong of a statement. I run stock kernels on Slackware all the time. In your particular situation, it would be a good idea to get a more optimized kernel running, and one that is specifically tuned to your machine, because you are working with limited resources (although be prepared for long compile times if you are going to do it on that machine, and I do mean long). It is nice to have an optimized kernel running even when you have plenty of system resources, but it is far from imperative, especially with all the features that are now usually modularized.

Even in your situation there is no rush, however. Also don't be discouraged if your first attempt doesn't boot, or makes it so some of your hardware components don't work. Just be ready to switch back to your old kernel if you have a problem. One thing you should know is that you do not need to reinstall your system to try out another kernel, either one of the several that come with Slack or one that you compile yourself. You can set up lilo to list an entry for the kernel you are currently running plus more entries for kernels you are experimenting with. You just need to give lilo different kernel names to boot from for the expermental entries. If you get frustrated with your attempts to compile a kernel that performs better than the one you started with, then go on to other things for a while and come back to it when you have more experience.

I think Fluxbox might have an edge over Windowmaker for least resources used, but Windowmaker shouldn't be bad at all. Other window managers/environments that you might like to look at are IceWM and XFce. I personally use Fluxbox the most on even my most powerful machines because I like it, and because it's very fast compared to GNOME and KDE. I am thinking that Blindsight probably used Afterstep (a NeXTstep clone, like Windowmaker) rather than NeXTstep because I believe that NeXTstep was the actual window manager that came with the NeXT OS.

If you want to run a lighter weight browser, another thing that you could do (besides using Dillo or W3M or Lynx) is run the forked version of the Links browser (sometimes referred to as Links2; the original Links itself is another console browser alternative to Lynx). This is not the one that comes by default with Slack; that one is the latest one from the original project. The new Links project has options to run as a graphical browser from the console or from X Window. There is a version of it in the extras directory for Slack 9 that is compiled only for the graphical console options. If you want to run it from X you will need to compile it yourself. The homepage is here:
http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~clock/twibright/links/