me, myself and I

I was amazed, really amazed.
As you may have read in my previous posts, I have a very low-powered Dell Latituce CP running a Pentium I w/MMX Technology chip at 233MHz and maxed out the RAM at 128 MB! Definately not something new.

I've used Damn Small Linux on it pretty well, plus TinyMe and Fluxbuntu. The problem with these distros is that in order to minimize the footprint and memory usage they utilize a minimalist Window Manager instead of a Desktop Environment.

WINDOW MANAGERS and DESKTOP ENVIRONMENTS

What is the difference between a Window Manager and a Desktop Environment? From my understanding a Window Manager does exactly that.. it manages windows that you open up. Even a panel in Gnome, on the most basic level is just a window that opens up on the X server. Fluxbox and Openbox are very popular Window Managers, as FVWM and Blackbox is as well.

A Desktop Environment, on the other hand, includes tools and utilities to manage it and manage the system. The most popular ones I've heard of (and the only real Desktop Environemtns I've heard of ) are Xfce, Gnome and KDE.

So with these low-resource Window Managers, to make changes usually involve getting your hands wet with configuration files and/or command lines. For the Desktop Environments, Xfce has the reputation of being the lowest resource-hogging one.

SUSE 9.1

So I was fooling around with the system trying to see if I could get the Sugar Desktop Environement, which is the desktop environment for the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) Project. I figured since the OLPC was not the most powerful laptop (2x my CPU, 2x my RAM) that it may be light enough for my measly-spec-laptop. Unfortunately, after downloading 45+ MB of packages (over dial-up mind you), it didn't work.

About at that time, I found an old SuSE 9.1 Installation CD I had lying around from who-knows-when I burned it. I figured I'd give it a go since it's an older version and my laptop is an older laptop.

Surprised, it showed up on the screen and even started installing. One reason I was surprised was because I once tried CentOS, which is a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. CentOS would show the bootup screen with Boot Options, but no matter what I tried it would just reboot.

So it was started, that was a good first hurdle. The next one I was afraid of was an "insufficient memory" message I got when I tried to installa openSuse 10.2, the commmercial version of SuSE. Suprisingly, I didn't get it! Woo Hoo!

Even more surpising.. it completed it's installation, in about 2 hours +/-! And when I rebooted the system it came up alright! It was not quite as snappy as Fluxbox may have been (under DSL), but it also was not like trying to pass a whole cow! It was tollerable, full desktop environment and worked!

Not long ago, I tried it again, but this time with openSuse 10.2. I got my "insufficient memory" message but I looked closer and saw that there was an option to activate a swap partition to fulfill this obligation. So I did that, and it worked!

openSuse 10.2 streamlined!

Now I know that openSuse, being a recent edition, was going to include a LOT of things that this poor laptop cannot handle so when it came time to pick-and-choose the applications to install I tried being smart.

I know I wanted the base KDE system, but I wanted to minimize the other things installed. Regardless of my best efforts things have still gotten in and I am trying to root them out whenever possible.

I did not include any office suite because OpenOffice, I know, is a major resource hog! I didn't even want to install the Gimp, CUPS, or any mail server software.

I trimmed it down to a 900MB installation but once the dependencies were added it jumped back up to 1.3 or 1.4 GB! Oh well.

It took me 4 hours to install, plus switching CDs (used 3 CDs, there are no DVD drives on the laptop or I would have used my 10.3 DVD which would have made life easier).

Surprisingly, though, the system boots up a little faster it seems than Fluxbuntu, and is still a usable system even though it's got some lag.

The KDE includes some handy applications, such as for managing your NIC! I haven't tried it, but it looks like it gives me more options than Fluxbuntu has ever given me (plus Fluxbuntu uses more CLI stuff to keep the size down).

Afterwards, I watched #top for a bit to see what keeps poping up and taking valuable resources. One of the first ones I noticed was Beagle (and Kerry, the KDE Beagle interface). So I removed that component and now I'm searching for more.

Conclusion

I am very impressed that an up-to-date version of a Distro is able to run acceptably on such an older system! I already know that anytime the CPU has to be called into play that it's slow processor speed is going to rear it's ugly head but there is nothing that can be done about that! If I could fit more RAM that would be one thing, but it's already at it's maximum and I set up a 300MB swap file for the system to use (which it does). I know the graphics is not able to handle desktop "eye candy" and many modern applications, even if they will install, won't work at an acceptible speed.

If I want something that runs all of my applications with resources to spare then I need to purchase a new system. A realistic view and goal for a low-powered system is essential for happy using.

So now I have functionality and control with an modern distro on this old system. I never thought it would work but it does. I am looking to see what I can shut down or remove and then I am looking at installing some apps to make it more useful.