Unutterably Silly So what are you doing RIGHT NOW?

[devilsadvocate]

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.

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.

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.

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.

[SneakySnake]

I'M BORED!
I'M THE CHAIRMAN OF THE BORED!

[phenomshel]

Shopped til I dropped, LOL. We went looking for a couple of pairs of sweatpants and some long sleeved t-shirts for me. Came home with one pair sweatpants, two long sleeve t-shirts, one sweatshirt (ooops...gotta exchange that, it was supposed to be pants, not a shirt, but I grabbed the wrong thing. They package them all rolled up, so if you aren't careful...yeah.); one pair of black jeans, one pair of stonewashed blue jeans, one drapey sweater cardigan in ombre grey, and one ruana in black crochet. Oh, and a new pair of work shoes. I was also half looking for a pair of ankle boots to wear with jeans, but no joy on that. I don't want suede, cause the first snowfall will kill them; and I want a heel, but not TOO high, or I won't be able to wear them if I'm going to be walking any distance at all. So...leather and a low heel but not a non existent heel...found several possibles, but none that really did it for me (or Chris).

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by devilsadvocate

My hunch tells me the problem is the CPU; 256 MB of RAM will carry an XPSP2 install just fine.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

GTK isn't a problem. And XFCE performs well enough.

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.

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.

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.

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.)
______
Dennis

[SneakySnake]

Originally Posted by phenomshel

Shopped til I dropped, LOL. We went looking for a couple of pairs of sweatpants and some long sleeved t-shirts for me. Came home with one pair sweatpants, two long sleeve t-shirts, one sweatshirt (ooops...gotta exchange that, it was supposed to be pants, not a shirt, but I grabbed the wrong thing. They package them all rolled up, so if you aren't careful...yeah.); one pair of black jeans, one pair of stonewashed blue jeans, one drapey sweater cardigan in ombre grey, and one ruana in black crochet. Oh, and a new pair of work shoes. I was also half looking for a pair of ankle boots to wear with jeans, but no joy on that. I don't want suede, cause the first snowfall will kill them; and I want a heel, but not TOO high, or I won't be able to wear them if I'm going to be walking any distance at all. So...leather and a low heel but not a non existent heel...found several possibles, but none that really did it for me (or Chris).

Ah the joys of needing clothes.

I don't go out very often. I work in my pyjamas at home, and at site I wear a uniform shirt. Heels? Any decent shoes would be ruined at site, and I am barefoot in the house. *sigh* maybe I should get a proper job so I need some nice clothes and shoes. All my good stuff is growing mould

[phenomshel]

Originally Posted by SneakySnake

Ah the joys of needing clothes.

I don't go out very often. I work in my pyjamas at home, and at site I wear a uniform shirt. Heels? Any decent shoes would be ruined at site, and I am barefoot in the house. *sigh* maybe I should get a proper job so I need some nice clothes and shoes. All my good stuff is growing mould

Yeah, at work we wear uniform shirts too, khaki pants, and sensible (boring?) shoes; but on weekends I like to mix it up a little if I can. I guess Chris is rubbing off on me, he usually dresses up a bit on weekends, (still jeans but with a dress shirt instead of tshirt and his boots instead of cross trainers). If I'm not going anywhere, though, in the winter sweatpants and sweatshirt is my preferred attire! So really I guess my wardrobe goes from slob to dressy casual, depending on where I'm going and what mood I'm in!

[devilsadvocate]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

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.

Then either I'm blessed or you're cursed. Just a few months ago I installed it on 2 separate machines (1 with a 30GB drive and 1 with a 40GB, both ATA-133) for a friend of mine to unload on FleaBay for US$15 or whatever. Both had 128 MB RAM and 733 MHz processors (one was an AMD K6 I believe, the other an Intel Celeron). All the way through a Service Pack 3 update, neither would win any races but neither choked. One of my long-ago store-bought Gateway machines had 256 MB and a Celeron; XP didn't give me any more problems than anyone else dealt with and I was greedy, at least by 2003 standards.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

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.)

Doesn't surprise me; drive I/O is the biggest speed killer of them all.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

GTK isn't a problem. And XFCE performs well enough.

Well...

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.

Gnome uses GTK. So does XFCE, though not as extensively. This is why Ubuntu (and Fedora) suffer from what I've referred to as a 3BGD error, for "3 Billion Gnome Dependencies".

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

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.)

That's why I mentioned the multiboot CD in the first place; don't need a floppy drive that way, just make ISOs. Just trying to be helpful.

[MrPLD]

When you drop your desktop and replace it with something like Fluxbox it's rather amazing how much better your machine runs.

Of course, there's a lot of things missing in the Fluxbox desktop if you're not linux-savvy.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by phenomshel

Shopped til I dropped, LOL. We went looking for a couple of pairs of sweatpants and some long sleeved t-shirts for me. Came home with one pair sweatpants, two long sleeve t-shirts, one sweatshirt (ooops...gotta exchange that, it was supposed to be pants, not a shirt, but I grabbed the wrong thing. They package them all rolled up, so if you aren't careful...yeah.); one pair of black jeans, one pair of stonewashed blue jeans, one drapey sweater cardigan in ombre grey, and one ruana in black crochet. Oh, and a new pair of work shoes. I was also half looking for a pair of ankle boots to wear with jeans, but no joy on that. I don't want suede, cause the first snowfall will kill them; and I want a heel, but not TOO high, or I won't be able to wear them if I'm going to be walking any distance at all. So...leather and a low heel but not a non existent heel...found several possibles, but none that really did it for me (or Chris).

I hate shopping.....oh wait this isn't vent and rant....

[ShortNCuddlyAm]

Originally Posted by SneakySnake

Ah the joys of needing clothes.

I don't go out very often. I work in my pyjamas at home, and at site I wear a uniform shirt. Heels? Any decent shoes would be ruined at site, and I am barefoot in the house. *sigh* maybe I should get a proper job so I need some nice clothes and shoes. All my good stuff is growing mould

I'd go barefoot and scruffy all the time if I could. The shoes I like cripple me in no time at all, and I seem incapable of doing "smart" with clothes (I don't even try for elegant any more - on the rare occasions I need to dress up for a do, I now go for eclectic, which I can at least pull off)

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by SneakySnake

I'M BORED!
I'M THE CHAIRMAN OF THE BORED!

At least ya' ain't stoopid!

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by kennyc

I hate shopping....

You and me both, bro! That, and talking on the phone.

And I find it especially irritating to see people who are doing both at the same time.

[doreenjoy]

Killing time on MR when I should be sleeping. Stupid insomnia...

[FlorenceArt]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

You and me both, bro! That, and talking on the phone.

And I find it especially irritating to see people who are doing both at the same time.

I hate shopping too.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by doreenjoy

Killing time on MR when I should be sleeping. Stupid insomnia...

Man! Do I feel your pain....I had the same problem early early early today.