[Cialug] Distro Suggestion

David Champion cialug@cialug.org
Mon, 16 May 2005 15:22:22 -0500


Josh More wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-05-16 at 14:50 -0500, John Roach wrote:
> 
>>Does anyone know of a good distro with X for lower end systems? I am
>>looking at deploying this out for our users, so it will have to run
>>open office. I have been working with linspire 5.o and sofar 2
>>machines out would take an install.
> 
> 
> On my low end machines, I run Fedora with XFCE.  It's nice and snappy.
> 
> You can also look into Damn Small Linux.

How "low end" are you talking about?

I'm running Mandriva 2005 LE (aka Mandrake 10.2) on a P2 366 laptop w/ 
128mb RAM, and KDE, and it works fine. I also have Mandrake 10.1 on a P2 
266 desktop with 128mb RAM, and it's useable. Those are both running KDE.

When they switched to the 2.6.x kernel, it seems like it became a lot 
nicer to use on slower machines, I believe this is due to the updates in 
the virtual memory handling. When I had Mandrake 10.0 w/ a 2.4 kernel on 
that laptop, KDE was un-usable, and I had to run XFCE.

I don't run OpenOffice on those very much : I typically only have a 
couple of xterms, firefox, and maybe gaim running.

-dc