[Wolves] Talk: John Alexander - Making Hardware Work, 10th February

[Adam Sweet]

On 12/02/2021 07:27, Mark Croft Redditch Linux Mint wrote:
> Thank you everyone involved including top tutorial on finding hardware
> issues in Linux from John..
> 
> 
> Looking forward too next one..
> 
> I am installing solus Linux on slow dell latitude d520  laptop... ram
> 3gb . HDD 80gb .. it has got 64 bit Intel CPU.
> 
> *Dell Latitude D520 Review*
> 
>   * Processor: Intel Core Duo T2300E 667Mhz Dual Core.
>   * Display: 14.1 inch *XGA LCD Panel*.
>   * RAM: 512MB, DDR2-533 SDRAM, 1 DIMM.
>   * Hard Drive: Hitachi 100GB, 7200RPM.
>   * Optical: Sony 8X DVD+/-RW.
>   * Wireless: Intel PRO/Wireless 2200 802.11a/g WLAN.
>   * Battery: 6 Cell Primary Battery.

How's it going with that? I see the recommended specs for Solus is 2GB
RAM or more. The limiting factor for older machines seems to be less
than 1GB RAM and 32 bit CPUs these days so you might have a battle.

I have an old 32 bit netbook with 1GB RAM and it's pretty difficult to
find a distro that still supports 32 bit x86 CPUs. It's probably 10
years since the last 32 bit x86 machines were shipped and most
mainstream distros dropped support in the last 18 months. Last time I
looked I concluded that BunsenLabs, the successor to CrunchBang was one
of the few remaining options and required at least 1GB RAM.

About 2 years ago I was playing with an old 800MHz PowerPC Apple
Powerbook with 512MB RAM for the hell of it. I installed Lubuntu, but I
could just about get a low resource browser (Midori) with a single tab
but it wasn't really a usable machine. If I tried Firefox it would just
lock up while trying to render a page.

Looking it up, the CPU is actually 1.66 GHz. 667 MHz is the system bus
speed. Nevertheless, that seems like it will be an uphill struggle
without more RAM.

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