[NTLUG:Discuss] Looking for Distro recomendations

[Robert Pearson]

On 9/2/05, Jeff Miller <jeff at kd5yig.net> wrote:
> I'm looking for distro recomendations for an older laptop.  I've got 2
> old Toughbook cf-25's at home, one a 133 MHz and one a 166 MHz system.
> I'm wanting to make at least one of them into a GPS system for my truck,
> something with more than the standard 2" display on the small GPS
> systems.  I've already got a serial GSP antenna that seems to work fine,
> will have to wait and see though.  So, what I'm looking for is a
> distribution that will run well on that speed of system.  I tried
> Mandrake on them a while back and it just seemed a bit slow on them.
> Also, does anyone know of a mapping program out there that would run
> well on this speed of system?

It's not so much the processor speed as the MAX memory for that
processor speed. Next would be the hard drive size. When I was looking
for a small, lightweight Linux to prolong the life of my HP laptop I
did a Google for "Linux +laptop +small memory" and got many
interesting hits. One of the most interesting was---

<<Begin long URL>>
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other-formats/html_single/4mb-Laptops.html
<<End long URL>>

which is dated "25 March 2000". Still an interesting read. Gave me some ideas.

I know one person who very successfully runs Slackware 10.1 on
desktops with the processor speeds you have. I am not sure of the
memory size. He ran Slackware 8.1 for years. Finally forced to
upgrade.

The reason I did this was because my HP laptop developed a problem
with one memory socket limiting me to one socket and MAX memory of
256MB. Instead of 512MB MAX with both sockets. Yes, I know people who
run with 192MB in their laptops but they are more patient than I am.
The motherboard replacement cost was about the cost of a new comparable laptop. 
I limped  along for a while trying SuSE 9.2, 9.3, FC3, FC4 and then
Ubuntu. All of these run very slowly with 256MB of memory.
I am not knowledgeable enough to minimize the software packages
installed. I needed a lot of packages installed for Java programming.
Finally settled on SuSE 9.3. Slow but predictable for Java. 
FC4 ran really fast at first but as time went on some process
(database update, I think?) took over and just killed the performance.
Maybe I shouldn't have done all the updates? There were a lot of them.
Once it is working just say, "No More Updates!".

The most interesting thing was that I failed to create any swap on the
first installs and the J2EE package would not install. I had a 40GB
5400RPM disk so I created the MAX swap (2*MAX memory=512MB swap). With
a 750 MHz P3 the swap was barely utilized. J2EE loaded very slowly but
ran OK. The processor is too slow to take advantage of disk swap for
most applications. "tmpfs"  is faster but uses already scarce memory.
The HP laptop died completely the other day so it is new laptop time.

It is an interesting challenge and one can learn a lot...

Thanks,  Robert