Hey,

I'm running Sarge on an old Dell Inspiron 8000 that is probably not too far away from kicking the bucket. Debian as it is is a bit too much for the system, so it runs really slowly. What's the best way to turn it down to simpler graphics, programs, etc for a lower-level system?

Is there a Debian-specific solution, or a generic linux solution?

Even pointing me in the direction of the appropriate documentation would be great.

Thanks!

What is the Desktop Manager you're using? For such machine use smth light. Like IceWM or Fluxbox

Buying more RAM can do wonders for old hardware. If that's not an option, then use lightweight programs.

You can install at first just the Debian base system. After setting up the base system (adding a firewall and making sure that everything works), you can install x-window-system-core, aterm, and some light window manager, like icewm, fluxbox or wmaker (you can install several window managers and test which one you like best). I use wmaker with fbpanel.

With wmaker and fluxbox (but not with icewm) you can use "dockapps" -- more or less useful small programs that don't eat too much RAM. I use wmbutton as an application launcher, mixer.app to adjust sound volume, wmcdplay to play CDs, mountapp to mount partitions and removable media, and wmshutdown to halt or reboot system (wmshutdown needs setting UID for /sbin/shutdown before it works).

For web browsing you can use opera instead of firefox, and for e-mail sylpheed instead of thunderbird. Opera is not available from official Debian repositories but the opera web site has a deb package that you can download.

Abiword is a usable wordprocessor and leafpad a light text editor. You can use mc (Midnight Commander) or emelfm as a file manager. Mc is a terminal program that you can run in aterm and emelfm is a GUI program.

Xmms is a music player, gqview an image viewer, and xpdf-reader a pdf viewer.

In Debian you can do many things in terminal -- for example, aptitude is a powerful terminal frontend for Debian's package manager and abcde is an easy command line script for ripping CDs.

Just wanted to add to what Dead Parrot wrote.
I once tested Puppy Linux. Lightning fast and feather light. Worth trying on oldie.

Thanks for all the info, guys! This is EXACTLY what I was looking for. The changing a window manager is what I figured it would come to, but I was unsure of the Debian specifics in doing so.... this definitely has me pointed in the right direction. I started trying IceWM today, and i t's pretty good.

Maybe you find some of my webpages interesting. I run debian on my p1 166mhz and try to get as much as possible out of it.

How I install and configure:
http://users.skynet.be/six/gpure/tech/linux/debian.html

And which programs I use (and some other good ones):

http://users.skynet.be/six/gpure/tech/linux/apps.html

I hope the doc's can be of some help for you.

grtz

gunnar