Quote:
Originally Posted by Adoby
However with "only" 2GB RAM it may be better to try a Linux version that is made for older computers with limited memory. Linux Mint may work, but might feel sluggish. Other version of Linux will not only work but feel positively snappy and have great performance. Here are some alternatives: (I haven't really tested any of them.)
https://itsfoss.com/lightweight-linux-beginners/ |
I looked at several of those, and ran Puppy for a while.
Damn Small Linux was an attempt to create a distro whose ISO size was 50
MB in size. The scarce resource it was created for was network bandwidth, and it tried to be a distro you could get over a dial up modem connection. Development finally hit a wall when it was no longer possible to make upgrades and still stay within the 50MB limit.
TinyCore is also a tiny distro, but its tactic is a minimal ISO that just installs a base Linux system and lightweight GUI. Once it's up and running, you add applications after the fact.
Puppy is small but quirky, and very non-standard. I installed it on an ancient (circa 2005) Fujitsu p2110 notebook. It was a pass along from a friend who had upgraded to something more powerful, but loved it and didn't want to see it go into a dumpster. She said it was "slow, slow, slow".
Well, no surprise. It came with a whopping 256MB RAM, and used a Transmeta CPU. The Transmeta was an early attempt at power saving, and the CPU grabbed 16MB of RAM off the top for "code morphing", leaving 240MB RAM for the user. (Linus Torvald's first job in the US was at Transmeta.) It was further limited by an IDE4 HD. (That was a BIOS limitation, so swapping in a faster drive wasn't an option.) It came to me with WinXP Pro SP2 installed. It took 8 minutes just to boot, and much longer to do anything once up.
I viewed it as a test bed to see what performance I might wring out ot it without spending money. I swapped the original 30GB drive for a 40GB unit from a failed laptop, repartitioned, and installed Win2K Pro SP4, Puppy Linux, Ubuntu, and FreeDOS.
Win2K actually ran more or less acceptably, after I removed everything form startup that could be removed. A big win was disabling the Windows Update service. It wasn't going to get any, so why have it active? That saved 10MB RAM and a svchost.exe process.
Puppy and Ubuntu were installed on separate ext4 slices, but configured so each would mount the other's file system when booted. I spent some time setting things up so the was
one copy of large apps, accessible from either system. Both could see the Windows NTFS partition, and I had a driver for Windows that let it see and access the Linux file systems. The odd man out was FreeDOS, which could only see its own slice, but I didn't care.
Puppy booted quickly, and the default GUI is very low resource. The problems came with applications. Low RAM and slow HD made running a program of any size slow. I didn't even try to run a current Firefox. It would take 45 seconds to invoke, and was perceptibly slow once up. The version of Puppy I got bundled SeaMonkey 1.X as a combined browser/email/news reader application, as the smallest combination the developers could find. But it got left behind by advancing web standards and increasingly didn't work on major sites. I played with Chrome and Opera a bit, as smaller and faster invoking browsers, but they weren't what I'd call speedy. And network access, even connected by CAT5 cable to my router, was slow in Windows and Linux. Since actual work got done elsewhere and this was strictly an experiment, poor internet access wasn't a major concern.
The biggest oddity in Puppy was that it was explicitly single user, and you
always ran as root. I learned Unix on multi-user machines running AT&T Unix System V Release 2, and always running as root gave me hives. But I understood the reason - it was explicitly a single user system, and if you did the wrong thing as root you only shot yourself in the foot.
And one way Puppy (and DSL, and TinyCore) achieved small size was through Busybox. Busybox bundled cut down versions of standard Linux commands into a single large executable, and installed symlinks to run the commands as "busybox <command> <parameters>" It worked, but I preferred the full versions, and would up copying a lot of them over from the Ubuntu install.
(One chap on the Puppy forums impressed me. He described getting a working Puppy install on an ancient Toshiba system with
16MB RAM, to use as a dedicated media server. To do it, he had to remove everything from Puppy that
could be removed, and actually build the installation on a more powerful machine, then swap the HD with it into the Toshiba. He could not create it on the Toshiba. I shook my head in wonder.)
I tried installing Xubuntu. It installed and ran, but was snail slow. Posters on the Ubuntu forum felt that Ubuntu had an increasingly powerful idea of what "low end" was, too much Gnome had crept into Xubuntu, and recommended what I did - wipe it and re-install from the Minimal CD. The Minimal CD was about 10MB, and installed a bare bones command line Linux system. Once it was up, you could use apt-get to cherry pick what you wanted. I chose Lxde as the lightest weight GUI with the features I wanted, and that brought along the Xorg framework needed to have a GUI.
Installed on an ext4 file system, Ubuntu was bearable, and actually supported current browsers, though the slow network access still bit.
I wound up spending most time in Ubuntu on the machine.
I finally gave up after a failed Ubuntu upgrade. A new major version came out. It required PAE support, and the p2110 didn't have it. The install went fine till it tried to install the new kernel. That failed because of no PAE support. When it rebooted, many things didn't work because it didn't have the new kernel. I wound up wiping the install and redoing my setup from scratch, stopping carefully before the problem version. Ubuntu got a nastygram from me, on the order of "If the release requires specific hardware support like PAE, it should check that exists as the
first thing it does, and refuse to proceed if that prerequisite is lacking. It should
not get to the tail end of the install, fail to install the required kernel, then go to hell in a bucket on reboot."
Well, the whole exercise was an experiment on a machine that wasn't critical, and I had some fun and learned some things, but I reached the point where there wasn't much else I could do and stopped fiddling. I haven't booted it in months and months.
______
Dennis