[Cumbria] re the RH SuSe "discussion"

[Ken Hough]

Mike,

Yes, you can run X on a 486. In the past I've done it, but it's not 
really workable, certainly not at 33MHz and 8 MB RAM. With this the hard 
disk will be working very hard. Recent Distos (all as far as I know) 
REQUIRE a Pentium or better and usually 64 MB of RAM. If you wish to run 
on an older processor, the easiest solution will be to dig out one of 
the older distros. My 486 box is running SUSE v6.4. I also have v7.2. If 
anyone would like a copy of either of these, let me know.

Even with my Pentium 266 / 64MB RAM, the likes of KDE3 is not workable. 
It will run -- if you have helf a day to wait. It's workable with icewm 
though.
Haven't got around to trying to run applications via X over my network 
yet as everything I need is on the Athlon, so no driving need.

The SuSE manuals are, IMHO, useful intros to setting up Linux, but then 
I would say that. BTW there aren't many German words in latest manuals 
-- and it's ENGLISH English, not American!

Seriously, for anybody just getting into Linux, a good book is the way 
to go. Linux is different from MS systems and I found the best way was 
to dip into the book as and when needed. True, a lot (an awfull lot!) of 
info is 'on line' , but that's only useful after you learn where to find 
it. After the simplicity (?) of say MS Windows, the Linux file system 
can be daunting. Who would guess that there is such a wealth of useful 
documents under /usr/share/doc/howto/en/html ?

Sparc/Alpha?  Speed freak!  At the moment, a 1.4G Athlon is OK for me. I 
can watch TV, while attending to my mail (which seems to be growing 
fast). I can even burn CDs while doing other jobs -- something I 
wouldn't risk doing under MS WIndows 98. I've never had a duff CD under 
Linux, unless it was due to me getting it wrong.

Ken Hough

Michael Saunders wrote:

> 
>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) :)
>
>  
>