OT: old hardware - was Re: "to outlaw general purpose computers"

[Harmon Seaver]

On Wed, Jul 10, 2002 at 10:30:13AM -0400, Sunder wrote:
> On Tue, 9 Jul 2002, 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?
> 
> You missed the entire forrest of course by concentrating on a single pine
> needle from a single branch of a single pine tree.

   No, the point is that a lot of fairly old machines won't be obsolete for a
long time, at least running a decent OS. 

> 
> 
> Fine, have it your way:
> 
> Yeah? Which gnome? 1.0?  I wasn't concerned much about internet throughput
> as much as display rendering of shit like rendering menus and such.  
>

     Nope, I run gnome 4.0, and, I should say, I run it with 4 workspaces --
first one always has 4 gnometerminal sessions going, second has the latest
mozilla with at least 6 windows open, often acrobat reader as well, third one
has three gnometerminals and opera, which usually has at least a dozen sessions
open, and the fourth workspace usually has openoffice running. 
    I don't notice anything particularly slow. Compared to a 700mhz AMD at work
and a 1ghz I've played with, it's not bad. Oh, and also it's always running
apache, postfix, and usually mysql. 
    It would be nice to compile kernels faster. But even compiling them with all
the above running isn't that bad, and doesn't seem to seriously slow down the
rest.



> Oh, what, did you expect me to use Lynx maybe?


   No, mozilla and opera.

> 
> Let's also not forget that the older machines have limits on memory, which
> also affect performance.  I don't know about your hardware, but most of my
> old 100-200Mhz machines don't have motherboards that can handle much ram.  
> I'd be lucky to get 128mb in there -- if I were to bother hunting down ram
> for them and paying a lot more per megabyte for it than for say a pair of
> 512M dimms for the newer boxes.  And no, I'm not going to be spending $200
> on an accelerated 3d video card with 8mb for a piece of shit machine from
> 10 years ago either.  So yes, gnome is slow on old hardware.

   Well, this box (the tower case itself is about 10 years old) recently got
upgraded from a 200mhz to a 266 (actually it a 350 but the mb won't go that
fast, so one of these days I'll upgrade the mb, but I'm in no hurry), and it has
256 megs of RAM. DIMMS, of course. It also has a 16meg Matrox video card which
helps. 
    I suppose if you're a gamer or doing a lot of big graphics, you'd need more
power, but for what I'm doing. Heck, I can recall running a web server for a
fairly big library and a mail server for over 400 accounts on little 200mhz
boxes. Worked fine -- still would. 
    OTOH, if it looks like DRM is going to get mandated, I'll probably go out
and buy a dual AMD mb and a couple of 2ghz cpus, just so I'll be set for the
next decade.


-- 
Harmon Seaver	
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com