[Cumbria] re the RH SuSe "discussion"

[Michael Saunders]

On Mon, 6 Jan 2003, Ken Hough wrote:

> A fairly fast PC (500 MHz Pentium II or better / or 500 MHz AMD K6II)  
> with at least 256 MB RAM / 4 GB or more hard disk / CDROM Linux will run
> on much less, but tends to be sluggish. I have it running (without GUI)
> on an 80MHz 486 with 16 MB RAM

X should run fairly decently on that box -- providing you stick with a
lightweight window manager such as Fluxbox or IceWM. The oldest system
I've had X on was a 33 MHz / 8 meg 486 laptop -- could run xterms, xpaint,
xcalc etc. alright, but anything else would kill it. Recompiling the
kernel and important libraries can make noticeable difference in speed.

The nice thing about X though is its network transparency -- you can have 
a really old box with just vanilla X, and run all your apps on a powerful 
system, sending the graphics down the network line. Seeing Mozilla on an 
8M machine is cool :)

> I know I'm a SuSE convert, but as a new user, you might appreciate the
> manuals that they provide.

It's been about 6 months since I did any distro reviews, but at the time 
SuSE still had by far the best hardcopy docs of all mainstream distros. 
(Except for the odd German word -- "Ziffer" anyone?).

> 32 bit Pentium 4 contains over 40,000,000 transistors and is clocked at
> around 3 THOUSAND times faster.

Yeah. It's still a hamster in a wheel though, just running faster and
faster and faster... (you can tell I want a Sparc/Alpha) :)

-- 
Michael Saunders
www.aster.fsnet.co.uk