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Originally Posted by Gregg Bell
Isn't it possible that somebody will pick up the reins at some point?
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Possible, but unlikely. They were looking for donations to help fund development and more folks to get involved in development, and neither was forthcoming. (Sigil was a masters thesis in Computer Science project for the original author. It impressed Google enough that they hired him, so his time to do much more on it is limited.)
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Now I have Xubuntu on a laptop (Dell 125MB RAM) that is really slow, even when directly hooked up to an ethernet cable. I also compose on this laptop on LibreOffice and once it warms up the LO is pretty responsive. I don't really need the laptop for anything but composing but would getting Puppy or something like that speed things up for me?
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Probably not enough to matter. Linux likes RAM, and you need more. There are distros like Puppy and Tiny Core that will run in 125MB RAM, but that's for suitable values of "run"
My p2110 is an example. It has 256MB RAM, but the CPU grabs 16MB off the top. Puppy itself runs pretty well, but apps of any size are another matter. Things like LO take a long time to load and aren't the quickest things in creation once up.
The problem is that there isn't enough RAM to hold everything, so the system has to do a lot of swapping to the swap partition. That's
slow. You have Linux itself and the disk cache it maintains occupying RAM before you even start to load programs and do work. (And the p2110 has a relatively slow IDE4 HD which is a BIOS limitation, and that makes it worse.) The biggest thing you can do is minimize disk access.
You didn't say anything else about the system other than low RAM, so it's hard to give advice, but the
first thing I'd do is give it more RAM. 512MB would be nice. More would be better. (How much it can take will depend on exactly what make/model it is.) Crucial.com and memoryx.com are where I would look to get more RAM. They probably have memory that will work in your machine. The issue will be cost. For instance, I can still get a 128MB daughtercard to take my p2110 to 384MB, but it costs too much to be worth doing. Memory for older systems is a
lot more expensive per MB than for newer ones.
I tried Xubuntu on the p2110, and it was snail slow. Posters on the Ubuntu forums suggested that too much Gnome had crept into Xubuntu, and that Canonical had a steadily increasing idea of what "low end" was. They suggested what I did - get and install from the Minimal CD, which gave me a working command line environment (including networking, which can be a major PITA to get working.) I could then use apt-get to install what I needed. I installed Lxde, which is about the lightest weight GUI, and that brought Xorg, the X-Windows framework with it.) From there I could pick and choose other things. The result was not a speed demon, but was usable.
See what a RAM upgrade would cost, and decide what's it's worth to you.
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Dennis