"to outlaw general purpose computers"

[Bill Stewart]

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.