"to outlaw general purpose computers"

[Harmon Seaver]

On Wed, Jul 10, 2002 at 10:11:58AM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
> 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.
> 

   All quite true. I've got a 486X33 w/20meg that runs linux just fine,
commandline only, although I've got gnome working on it, I don't bother. Good
enough for firewall, router, etc. And I had a bunch of P100 w/16meg that I was
running for awhile as remote boot/NFS/NIS workstations. They worked pretty well,
but were slow with KDE or gnome so went with Afterstep. Also loaded StarOffice
very, very slowly, but Word Perfect popped up fairly well. Granted, I'd rather
use at least a 200, but those were good enough for reading email and websurfing.
   Actually I was recently working with a library that had all 486 machines,
486DX-100 w/32 megs -- running W95, and even they were usable for web surfing. 
   On my main home linux box, a 266, adding the second 128 DIMM didn't seem to
help a great deal -- mind you, I don't doubt that people can see clear
differences with benchmarks and all, but I can't recall the last time I ran any.
I've also got a dual-processor 200mhz (604e)  Mac with 512meg, it seems fairly
fast, good enough for watching DVD movies, although one of these days when I've
got a lot of loose change I'll probably stick a pair of G4's in that and add
another 512 of RAM, just for the heck of it. 8-)


> 
> 

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