Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
Win2K Pro seemed a better fit for a 256MB machine, but I was overly optimistic. It's almost as slow once up, and takes much longer to boot.
|
My hunch tells me the problem is the CPU; 256 MB of RAM will carry an XPSP2 install just fine. Further, I don't think it's necessarily the speed of the CPU alone; didn't Transmeta/Cyrix/VIA CPUs need a special OEM version of Windows or something? They might nominally be x86 but with different instruction sets that MS didn't see the need to optimize for since they weren't covering enough ground market-wise. I've discovered that no matter who wrote the code, if an OS can't find something it's looking for (even if it's not critical to the operation of the machine) it'll eat up a truckload of CPU cycles looking for it/logging that it can't find it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
Posters on the Ubuntu forums suggested too much Gnome had crept in and it was no longer really lightweight, and that Ubuntu had a steadily advancing idea of what "low end" was. The recommended an install from the MinimalCD.
|
Ubuntu, like Fedora, is a Gnome-centric distro; most of what it will use for desktop stuff will have Gnome/GTK deps beacuse it's easier on the repo maintenance to have fewer packages and less redundancy; a big plus when your unsaid goal is to be all things to all people. Further, XFCE uses mostly GTK stuff.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
I wanted to redo the Puppy install anyway, to go to an ext4 file system, so I wiped the Puppy and Ubuntu slices and reinstalled. Ubuntu from the MinimalCD gave me a bare bones CLI installation, and I could use apt-get to selectively install the parts I wanted. Xfce4 was fine as GUI, and installing it brought along the rest of X-Windows as a dependency. It's not quite as sprightly as Puppy, but is at least usable. Large apps like Open Office or Firefox are still slow, but the problem there seems to be disk I/O, and will be present regardless.
|
I don't know if it's a moot point yet or not but you might try XFS instead of ext4; handles small consecutive writes much faster and the journaling is more efficient. I was going to say pitch the journaling overboard entirely then thought of how many miles that HD might have on it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
I'm tempted to replace Win2K with Win98SE and KernelEX, which will let me run an assortment of NT/2K/XP apps under 98. The problem is that I haven't found a way to tell Win98 "Install to this partition." It wants to take over and wipe the whole drive. I could do that, then repartition with GPartEd and re-install Puppy, Ubuntu, and FreeDOS, but I'm not quite up to going through the effort. (The machine does not have a floppy drive, so booting from a floppy boot disk isn't possible.) |
Look into something called Gujin; it allows for multiple bootable images to be put on one CD. FreeDOS and Puppy will easily share a CD. Also, they still make USB floppy drives and the most expensive one I've seen is US$20. It would appear in your case that this wouldn't be the only time you'd have a use for it.