[NTLUG:Discuss] Looking for Distro recomendations

[Stephen Klein]

Jeff Miller wrote:
> Hey all,
> 
> 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?
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Jeff
> 
> _______________________________________________
> https://ntlug.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
> 
> 

I've had non-X Slackware install squeezed into a 50MHz 486 with 12MB RAM 
once, but that was several years ago.  I've had other Slackware installs 
on 486's with as little as 32MB RAM running X and various window 
managers.  Memory performance will be the biggest bottleneck, anything 
less than EDO will have serious performance issues.  But, if you avoid 
memory intensive applications like web browsers you the responsiveness 
will probably be acceptable.

As for your other question about GPS mapping software, the selection is 
rather limited I'm afraid.  I know of two, one is GPSDrive, the other is 
RoadMap.  I've used GPSDrive, and it works reasonably well for finding 
your position on a map, but I don't think it is capable of direction 
finding.  Unfortunately, GPSDrive hasn't been actively developed for 
over a year now.  RoadMap appears to have direction finding capability, 
but I haven't used it so I can't offer any kind of opinion about it.  It 
looks promising though, and it seems to still be in active development.

Search on Freshmeat.net for these two packages.

Hope this helps,
Stephen Klein