At 08:49 PM 07/09/2002 -0500, Harmon Seaver wrote:
On Tue, Jul 09, 2002 at 03:17:52PM -0400, Sunder wrote:
Sure, you can revive old hardware with Linux, but you'll find it runs KDE 3.0 or GNOME slower than windows 95 did on the same hardware. So unless you're willing to also go to older software (or at least less demanding software) you've still got a useless machine.
What? Your brand of crack must be particularly poor these days. A 200mhz cyrix cpu runs linux w/gnome fast enough for most anything. Slower than w95??? Come again? I've run 1ghz boxes and they really don't surf the net much faster, so what's your point?
The big issue tends to be memory rather than CPU speed - while Linux isn't quite the bloatware that Windows is, you *really* don't want to run GNOME with the default window manager on a P66 with 16MB RAM. Trust me, you don't :-) Works just fine with TWM or other lightweight window managers. You also wouldn't want to run current IE / Netscape 6 on it, though Netscape 4.7x worked fast enough. If your box can support current PC100 / PC133 SIMMs, you can probably upgrade it with enough memory to run the newer applications ok, but the generation of machines with Fast Page Mode 72-pin memory tends to be limited to 32MB or sometimes less, and 386s tend to be 8MB.