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Originally Posted by devilsadvocate
My hunch tells me the problem is the CPU; 256 MB of RAM will carry an XPSP2 install just fine.
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Not in my experience. XP wants 512MB
minimum to think about performing. If it doesn't get it, you get a good PC imitation of mainframe "death by thrashing", as it spends more time swapping stuff in and out of RAM than it does doing actual work. I played with the box a bit with the original Fujitsu installed XP version. Frozen snail slow.
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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.
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No again. Transmeta was going for a win in power saving, aiming at notebooks and the like. The 16MB grabbed off the top was for code morphing. But it actually implemented a bog standard X86 instruction set.
From what I can tell, the real killer here is disk I/O. As mentioned, it's a UDMA 4 HD, and there's insufficient RAM to do the sort of caching that might help. (It's also unclear that a faster drive would help. There appear to be mobo/BIOS limitations involved, and what I have is the best that can be supported.) Puppy is sprightly because it and the bundled apps it ships with are selected for small size. Bigger apps bog. Firefox 3.6, for instance, takes about 45 seconds to fully load and initialize (with a
small subset of my usual set of extensions), and is perceptibly sluggish once up. Open Office takes a similar amount of time. Eclipse takes about a minute. To the extent that I web browse from the box, I normally use a static build of SeaMonkey 1.1 for performance. (And this is
after redoing everything to use Ext4 and extents. Performance in the former Ext3 setup was about 1/3
worse.)
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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.
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GTK isn't a problem. And XFCE performs well enough.
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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.
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If and when Puppy supports XFS (it's a stated goal of development) I might do so. Right now, it doesn't, and I want each Linux flavor to see/use the other's partition. Part of what I've spent time doing is setting things up so there is
one copy of things like OO, Firefox, and Eclipse, accessible from either side.
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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.
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I don't care about the multiple bootable images sharing a CD. I may have to spring for a USB floppy. (Part of the exercise with the ancient box was to see how much performance I could squeeze out of it
without spending money on it.)
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Dennis