I'm just getting my feet wet with Linux, and all I have to work with for the moment is an old Pentium III Celeron 600. I'm leaning towards Mandrake because from what I've read it has an easier learning curve than many of the other distros, but it isn't totally windows-ized either.

Is this reasonable? What can I do to slim down Mandrake to make it more responsive on my old clunker?

Or should I punt until I can get a faster machine to work with?

(I don't plan to be doing any heavy duty development to start with. Probably more general desktop use: email, IM, surfing, etc. until I get up to speed.)

That machine is fast enough. Just disable services you won't be using like maybe Apache, Sendmail, and any other that might take up some resources.

Your machine isn't a clunker though, fastest machine I have is 900mhz, 800mhz, 500mhz, and all the rest are less than 300mhz and I run Linux on all of these with no problems.

Cheers.

Good to hear.

I could use a little more detail though, on what to disable and how to go about doing it. A pointer would be fine if you know of one. (I'm sure this type of thing must have come up before...)

I'm guessing there might be UI stuff I should stay away from as well (in addition to services like Apache). For example, I've played a bit with GNOME and liked it so far, but am wondering how much of a resource hog it is.

Gnome should run fine on a machine like this if you got more than 128 megs of RAM. As for processes or services running, I'd just perform a custom installation, install what you want or going to use and then anything you don't most likely won't be running since its not installed, etc.

I have a laptop with 96 megs of ram and a 400 MHz processer. It runs fine but the memory thing will be improved soon. It is fast enough to be a computer that I can do all my regular tasks but of course it's not my main computer.

There should almost never be a time when you consider a pentium or higher processor useless with linux.

Mandrake ain't Windows. That computer is fine! I run a pII 266 and it runs great.

I wouldn't really bother with a custom install if you're a newbie. It will take up less harddrive space but it won't make your system faster.

Shutting off services really doesn't make a difference in my experience. That's more of a security thing. Unused services take up almost no CPU time. Still, go into Mandrake control center and shut off things you don't need.

Distros aren't really better or worse for old hardware (except in terms of RECOGNIZING hardware, which mandrake is great at). The biggest issue is what graphical environment you use. If GNOME/KDE are slow, try IceWM or Windowmaker. (Both are on the Mandrake CDs). You could also try Blackbox. On my PII Blackbox absolutely screams.

One good way to keep mandrake slim is to isntall as much as possible manually. During install, when you get to package selection, uncheck everything. Then you will be asked if you want perhaps X installed and documentation. Say that you want X and the documentation. This will give you a very minimal installation but with enough of the gui tools to install whatever you need afterwards. This way, you can be pretty sure that not too many things will be running in the background.

You can install software from mandrake control center -> software management.

Not to shock anyone, but I'm running MDK 9.1 on a P166 with 64MB ram and a K6 233Mhz with 64MB ram...both run absolutely fine. Only caveat is that I can't have too many things running because of the shortage of RAM, but that's why I have 2 of them...1 runs stuff like DNS and my bandwidth monitor and the other one runs as my file server (the K6)

My point (I quickly realized I wasn't making one...) is that MDK will run on pretty much anything you throw at it..even a 386 (I think I had MDK 8.2 running on an old 486 66Mhz with 32MB at some point). the slower you go and the less ram you have, the more sacrifices you'll have to make. On my 2 systems, I don't even have an X Server installed...there's simply no resources to support that

Not true, I've had X running with 32 megs!

I stand corrected...WOW

Yeah, almost any distro will run on WAYYY older machines than a 600...(*drool* wish I had 600Mhz in my lappy). I had Mdk 8.1 on my P133 (fileserver) running fine til I wiped it and now it runs slack9.1.

My friend installed Mdk 9.1 successfully on a p133 with 96 megs of ram...got KDE to run (but SLOOOOW) and Oo (also SLOOOW but he said it was useable). Basically he uses blackbox and stuff for email, surfing...now he's just bought a brand new P3 so he'll use the p133 as a router or something.

magicvcash said:
MDK will run on pretty much anything you throw at it..even a 386 (I think I had MDK 8.2 running on an old 486 66Mhz with 32MB at some point).

That is not correct, recent Mandrake distros will only run on Pentium and later processors. I am not sure when this started but I do not think that you can run 8.1 on a 486.

Before you chuck out your old hardware there are plenty of Linux distros that will be fine. In fact I am still running a 486 running Smoothwall firewall router. I have not checked but I bet Debian will have no problems either.

ZB

I stand corrected yet again

Do you know what the minimum processor/RAM requirements are for MDK 9.1 are?

64 megs.

It looks as though were both sort of right so we can call it a draw When all else fails I read the manual and the install.htm on the 9.2 disc 1 says:

MPORTANT COMPATIBILITY NOTE: Mandrake is built with CPU speed optimizations for Pentium-class (Pentium(tm) and compatibles, AMD Athlon, Pentium 4...) so it WILL NOT RUN on older i386 and i486 based computers. However, a special version compiled for those CPUs will be available for download from our servers and on cheap CD-Roms.

I have not found any minimum RAM spec. I guess that without a gui it would run on 16megs RAM or with something light like icewm 32 megs would do. It depends what you want to do. I would not want to use that sort of box for routine browsing, email, office work etc,

ZB