WM for very slow computers

Message

EmptyDoor · Post by **EmptyDoor** » Mon Dec 19, 2005 2:24 pm

Hello,

I am the head of the students' council at a secondary school in Norway. We have managed to obtain some computers that we are planning to place in various classrooms.

The slowest ones have Cyrix Concord Pentium 133MHz with 32MB RAM and ~1.62GB HDD,
while some have AMD K6 200MHz wth 64MB RAM and 4GB HDD, and
Pentium II 350MHz with 64MB RAM and 6GB HDD.

They all have Windows 95/98/98SE presently.

Is it possible to make them run at decent speed with a graphical Linux environment?

morodoch · Post by **morodoch** » Mon Dec 19, 2005 2:35 pm

I run a Pentium MMX 233 laptop, with 32MB of RAM, built under gentoo (on another system, of couse

It runs OK.

I use fluxbox for a WM, links2 / dillo for browsing, and sylpheed for e-mail.

links2 will actually run without X, if you build it to do so. It's OK.

It does take a long time to boot, but once it's up-and-running it's usable - even with wifi & ipsec I can play ogg files.

It works even better with tightvnc to a server running firefox, though. I built it with these CFLAGS:

Code: Select all

CFLAGS="-Os -march=pentium-mmx -mcpu=pentium-mmx -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe"

Oh, and FWIW I think it struggles more for RAM than CPU.

HTH

at240 · Post by **at240** » Mon Dec 19, 2005 3:35 pm

The Pentium2 should be OK. I'm not sure how responsive the others will be---have never tried anything quite that slow. I'd recommend fluxbox as your window manager and maybe rox as your filer.

As for the rest, search these forums for things like 'lightweight browser', 'lightweight mail client', and so on. You will turn up lots of suggestions.

EmptyDoor · Post by **EmptyDoor** » Thu May 04, 2006 9:45 pm

Thanks for the tips!
It took a long time to get it all started, but in this week and the previous one some of the computers were installed into classrooms (actually, only two computers yet). They run Entrance as desktop manager, FluxBox as window manager, but FluxBox is only used for starting Citrix ICA, to connect to the school's servers

.
The computers have
Pentium 166 MHz
32 MB RAM
S3 video card with 2MB VRAM

The K-6 and Pentium 2 use KDM as desktop manager, and FluxBox as window manager. They use KOffice for writing stuff, and Konqueror for file/Internet browsing. Although the KDE apps use some time to start, they run smooth once they are up and running. CUPS is also running to allow for local printing.

The only performance problem is that Entrance uses a colour cursor, which moves very jerkily on the 166 MHz PCs. Is there a way to disable it? I can't find anything in Entrance's database file, so is there an option at compile time?

iopi · Post by **iopi** » Thu May 04, 2006 10:06 pm

I personally just use openbox/occasionally pypanel for older machines

bobwhoops · Post by **bobwhoops** » Fri May 05, 2006 4:47 am

Ratpoison is a good light WM

Aurisor · Post by **Aurisor** » Fri May 05, 2006 1:25 pm

I'm surprised nobody has brought up windowmaker yet. I used to run it on a bunch of 486's we had back in High School....ran just dandy. I also find the interface to be one of the most friendly of the lightweight wm's.