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From: TBerk on 4 May 2008 20:20

Say I wanted to load a Linus OS on a Pentium (not II or III) IBM
Laptop (non-booting Hard Drive) and/or an HP with oh I think its a
PIII running under 900Mhz, then wouldn't I want to seek out the
smaller distributions; those with less bells and whistles perhaps but
still able to recognize video chipsets and bioses, right?

As I write this I'm wondering if any one has ever produced an overlap
table of best fits between eras of processors vs a given family
version of Linux flavors?


TBerk



From: whitemice on 4 May 2008 21:49
On May 4, 8:20 pm, TBerk <bayareab...(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Say I wanted to load a Linus OS on a Pentium (not II or III) IBM
> Laptop (non-booting Hard Drive) and/or an HP with oh I think its a
> PIII running under 900Mhz, then wouldn't I want to seek out the
> smaller distributions; those with less bells and whistles perhaps but
> still able to recognize video chipsets and bioses, right?

There is little point to most of the tiny / light distros. Just chose
a mainstream distro (openSUSE, Fedora, Debian) and do a minimal
install.

I run openSUSE on 900MHz vintage machines without any issues.

> As I write this I'm wondering if any one has ever produced an overlap
> table of best fits between eras of processors vs a given family
> version of Linux flavors?

From: Mark Hobley on 5 May 2008 05:08
whitemice <adamtaunowilliams(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> There is little point to most of the tiny / light distros. Just chose
> a mainstream distro (openSUSE, Fedora, Debian) and do a minimal
> install.
>
> I run openSUSE on 900MHz vintage machines without any issues.

I run Debian on Pentium 120 desktop machines and vintage laptops, again
there are no problems. (I think my laptop is a Pentium II 750MHz
Toshiba, with ATI Rage graphics chipset.)

I would choose a laptop with an ATI Radeon or ATI Rage based video
chipset (compatible with open source drivers), to display 3d graphics.

Regards,

Mark.

--
Mark Hobley,
393 Quinton Road West,
Quinton, BIRMINGHAM.
B32 1QE.
From: General Schvantzkopf on 5 May 2008 07:38
On Sun, 04 May 2008 17:20:12 -0700, TBerk wrote:

> Say I wanted to load a Linus OS on a Pentium (not II or III) IBM Laptop
> (non-booting Hard Drive) and/or an HP with oh I think its a PIII running
> under 900Mhz, then wouldn't I want to seek out the smaller
> distributions; those with less bells and whistles perhaps but still able
> to recognize video chipsets and bioses, right?
>
> As I write this I'm wondering if any one has ever produced an overlap
> table of best fits between eras of processors vs a given family version
> of Linux flavors?
>
>
> TBerk

How much memory do you have? Memory size is much more important than
processor speed. I have Fedora 8 on an old 500MHz 384M laptop and its
usable as long as you only run one application at a time, if you try and
do more than that you get paging. 512M would be much more comfortable, a
500MHz 512M machine would work fine. BTW Fedora has been getting faster
with each release so I'd recommend F8 or F9. Also I was trying out the
latest Ubuntu, 8.0.4, on my test machine yesterday. Ubuntu felt
noticeable slower than Fedora 8 or 9. I'm not sure why that is because
it's using the same version of Gnome as F9. My test machine has a lot of
memory (3G) and a reasonably fast processor (single core 2.4GHz A64), the
only thing that's weak is the graphics processor which is an onboard
Nvidia G6150 but I disabled the 3D effects which are on by default in
Ubuntu but that didn't help. But bottom line Fedora for whatever reason
is definitely faster than Ubuntu so I'd go with Fedora 8 if I were you
(Fedora 9 is still a beta).
From: TBerk on 5 May 2008 14:23


OK, so later versions (with better support & drivers, natch) and
minimal install is a better fit than matching Old Versions & Old
Hardware.


Got it, Thx.

TBerk

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