I tried to use very old PC (P133, 80M RAM, 1,7 GB HDD) for a basic text editing (kword), webbrowsing (konqueror), music (xmms).
I used Slackware 10.2 with icewm.
Bootup time is quite reasonable but starting any application last for ever. e.g. starting kwrite takes about 10 seconds not to mention about responsibility.
I turned off all unnecessary services but memory load is about 80%.
On the same hardware Windows 98 with Office 97 seems to be much faster.

Is there any way to have this hardware usable under Linux or is Windows 98 the only solution for this hardware?

BTW.
What is the bottle neck? X server?
There are so many articles stating that Linux can be used on older hardware better than Windows but it seems that using X on anything with CPU below 400 MHz is purely theoretical.

Imho your biggest bottleneck is KDE - using KDE apps outside of KDE will always be slow because KDE caches so much of itself on startup. Try OpenOffice / Firefox and see if you notice a difference, also, use static binaries to speed up the launch times (if you compile from source). The downside to static binaries is the extra diskspace they take up, tho'.

If they don't work, you might like to try a browser called Amaya (http://www.w3.org/Amaya/) which I find loads speedily even on my PlayStation2 and an editor called nedit (www.nedit.org which loads at the speed of notepad, but gives you a gazillion more options (and syntax highlighting!).

Also you might like to look at compiling a custom kernel to get the most out of your hardware, it'll save some diskspace if you don't compile in unneeded devices ... looking at your disk space you might have to compile the kernel on another machine. There was a post about doing that up on LQ recently, have a scan down the main page if you want to know more.

I hope you stick with it and don't go back to Win98, I'm just sorry it takes more work to squeeze the maximum power out of the machine!

Good luck,
- Piete.

The main issue is your RAM. I don't think that will run OpenOffice, either. Perhaps you could use a different editor? Even Abiword works better on old hardware for me, than K*.

And you might try Fluxbox as your window manager. It takes less than 3MB. Don't know how that compares to IceWin. In Linux you're going to need more RAM and less CPU, versus the opposite in Windows.

piete,

I'm afraid OpenOffice / Firefox is not an option.
They are even more resource hungry than KOffice / Konqueror.

I'll take a chance with Abiword and maybe Amaya and see if it is usable.

BTW.
Do you know how can I measure memory consumption under console?
For a moment I use ksysguard but it is also quite memory consuming.

top gives memory details etc on the system.

Two commands. "free" and "top"

Try top. Once in top, h for help.

Hey, i have seen once a personal site from a guy which tested firefox, opera, konqueror and lots of webbrowser. After this test, he found out that the fastest browser in different operations (i really don´t remenber, but was things like loading pictures, loading a page with a javascript code) was opera version 7.54.

Sometimes, Konqueror can be faster because kde pre-loads it on startup (default option).

I advise you to use opera with window manager icewm and Abiword. And serious, kde is not an option.

Also consider using a programa called prelink (i don´t know if you can use it in slackware because i use debian) which can make programs start faster.

I ran Slackware 9.1 in a Pentium II - 266 with 64MB RAM and 4GB HD using a 3GB partition for Slack and the rest for Windoze - I don't remember how big was the swap but it wasn't so big... I had a 8MB videocard (don't remember much about it).

I recompiled the kernel (it costed me some days) And I customized that system very well. I even was able to run KDE. Not as fast as I like, but it did work.

Of course, fluxbox is still a lot faster specially in older hardware. It's true that KDE apps load KDE libs and that's a mess.

In the other hand I ran Slackware 10.2 in a Pentium III 900 with 128 MB RAM. (SiS integrated video) It was very slow. Mostly the RAM consumers are X and KDE if you have them. X plus Fluxbox will eat far less memory but X will still eat a lot.

I advice you to get more memory and a bigger HD.

Good luck!

I haven't never tried it but I know of other Linux users who use it...Latex. This is another word processor worth checking out so you don't have to go back to Win'98.

http://www.latex-project.org/

From Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LATEX


Have you tried Lynx?

http://lynx.browser.org/

Not as sexy as Mozilla/Opera/Firefox, but it is a text based browser.

Latex is good but it's meant to be a typsetting language so it's a lttle more involved than OO or Kwrite etc. Having said that tho it's great fun to learn, and with pdflatex you can produce your own pdfs.

If you do want to try out Latex there is a front end called Kile http://kile.sourceforge.net/ that makes things a little easier.

get hold of Dillo for your web browser
Abiword for a word processor
and gentoo as your file manager (not the distribution)
IceWm is probably the fastest and lowest memory usage, but not much different to fluxbox/blackbox

These knocked the spots off win98SE on my Pentium 166MMX Laptop 128M ram and was stable try saying that for win98

For more hints try this: [HTML]http://users.skynet.be/six/gpure/tech/lightdesktop.html[/HTML]

Samac

See if the following helps:

Optimizing KDE for Older Hardware

I use KDE and Slackware on both of my boxes. Both boxes are considered old. One box is an ASUS TXP4 motherboard. I replaced the original 233 MHz Pentium MMX with a 400 MHz K6-III+. The other box uses an ASUS P2B motherboard with a 350 MHz Pentium II Deschutes. Both boxes have 256 MB of RAM and both have 40 GB Seagate Barracuda hard drives with DMA and fluid dynamic bearings. Both boxes have early generation video accelerator cards and in the second box the card is AGP.

I am not into games or high-end graphics. My boxes are basic workstations for web browsing, email, word processing, etc.

Boot times between my NT4 OS and Slackware/KDE do differ, but that is comparing apples and oranges primarily because I do not run the same services in both OSs. Therefore I think that topic is not worth discussing.

The Linux kernel seems to be more RAM intensive than CPU intensive. In my experience, the two most noticeable bottlenecks with GNU/Linux is a lack of RAM and a lack of hard drive DMA. I have noticed people using CPUs that are faster than mine but using less RAM and typically they observe that KDE runs very slow on their boxes. Thus, my guess is adding RAM is the principal solution toward improving an older box and running KDE.

My guess is the bottleneck on your box is similar to my experience: the hard drive likely does not support DMA and 80 MB of RAM is not a whole lot.

One of my boxes is multi-boot with Windows NT4 Workstation installed. FWIW, nothing I do gets anything on GNU/Linux to run as fast as everything on my NT4 OS. I offer this statement not to start any flame wars, but only as a personal observation. Opening the File Explorer is always almost instantaneous. MS Word 97 starts in about 2 seconds. In comparison, OpenOffice 2.0 requires about a minute to start and open. Firefox 1.07 (Windows) requires about 12 seconds to start whereas in Slackware/KDE I see about 20 seconds. Opera 8.50 opens in about 3 to 4 seconds in Windows and I have not yet tested in Slackware/KDE.

Of course, starting a program is hardly the full story. More importantly is how do the apps respond after opening. Generally, I'd say that KDE programs respond well once started and open. But like my overall observation with NT4, everything in NT4 responds noticeably faster than anything in KDE. Word 97 is as fast as I could want for any full-fledged word processor. I use a lot of template-based documents, styles, and macros too.

In KDE, starting programs is not as fast as anything in NT4, but also not worth crying about. I accept that I use older hardware, although comparing to my NT4 setup does raise an eyebrow. I do wish that Konqueror in file manager mode would open a tad faster, but I can live with what I have (yes, I have preloading enabled). Once open, however, Konqueror responds crisply.

I have noticed that the first time I do anything in KDE that the initial response is slow---that there is a delay of sorts---as though my request has to load specific libraries before my request can be acknowledged. Thereafter, the same request is faster. For example, the first time I select the KDE Menu, there is a noticeable pause before the menu opens, but thereafter in the session the response is immediate. I see a similar pause when trying to open context sensitive menus for the first time.

I have tried other distros and using the Slackware base with KDE is the fastest I have found for my old boxes.

Of course, some folks will recommend using different window managers. But for people who want to use KDE apps within those different window managers, I have to wonder how much any user gains. Additionally, a consistent look and feel is important to me. Thus, I don't bother with other window managers. But other people might not possess the same options as me and need to find alternate software to run on their older boxes. Only each individual can address those questions.

I suspect that because you use icewm rather than the KDE kwin window manager, a primary reason for the slow starting of KDE programs is that KDE must load all associated libraries each time. I suspect that using the KDE native window manager and booting the entire KDE desktop would provide some faster start times for KDE programs because some of those libraries would already be in memory (mostly through the kdeinit function). One question, however, is whether 80 MB of RAM is sufficient to run the entire KDE. Probably not.

In summary, KDE is quite useable on my boxes although NT4 is still faster. However, I also am of the opinion that one reason why vintage Windows OSs are faster than most GNU/Linux distros is that those older Windows OSs were designed in a day when faster hardware simply did not exist. Code had to run more efficiently. OTOH, GNU/Linux and KDE became popular after that period and faster hardware was then available. Thus, GNU/Linux programmers and developers did not devote much time to optimizing code for older boxes. I think the KDE developers have devoted a lot of energy toward tweaking the code for older boxes, but I also guess that this is not exactly a high priority. The presumption is most people own faster hardware, whether or not true.

A primary challenge with installing and running GNU/Linux on older hardware usually means a mix-match of solutions and that approach tends to be challenging for many typical users. Most users are not geeks, nor do they want to devote the time to becoming geeks. Nor should they. KDE is popular because the package is a complete desktop environment.

One possible solution then is to try a Slackware derivative distro such as Vector Linux.

KDE has gotten faster with each new release. I'm guessing that 3.5.1 will be just a tad faster too, although probably not enough for a rooster to crow. I suspect that my NT4 OS always will be the speed champion in my small office. And possibly just as important to me, my NT4 OS is rock solid and stable. I know that many people cannot say the same, but I have spent the past 8 years tweaking NT4 to my taste. The only app on NT4 that crashes regularly is Firefox (1.07). I haven't seen a BSOD on my box in a long time.

I hope this helps.

I bet that Woodsman is right: You main problem is the harddisc.
Linux and modern Windows and other OSs access the harddisc a lot. With older systems like Win95/98/ME this was not the case.

Check, if your HD supports DMA, and if so, turn it on.

80 MB isn't a lot, right, but I had Slackware running on a P120 classic with a 2 GB HD and only 40 MB of RAM, with X (Fluxbox as Window Manager). It was ok, until my HD controller got damaged and lost its DMA capabilities. Since then I have exactly the same problem as you. And that's why I am so sure that it's not your choice of software, and not even your RAM or CPU, but your HD that is too slow.

Of course, you can ease the pain with smaller programs, but it helps a bit more to switch of all unneeded daemons/services. A text editor won't write a lot of information forth and back, but some daemons do.

gargamel

You might want to try amigo linux.