“Like most companies, my employer has a stash of old, ‘obsolete’ PCs and laptops that won’t run the latest versions of Windows worth a darn. Naturally, this represents a great source of systems for testing the latest Linux distributions. I thought it would be interesting to find out which modern Linux distro made the best OS for a supposedly ‘obsolete’ old laptop. With this in mind, I requisitioned an oldie but goodie: an IBM ThinkPad 2662-35U, with a Pentium III 600MHz processor, 192MB of SDRAM, and a 20GB hard drive.”
I am as much a Linux fan as the next self proclaimed geek but I take issue with the idea that if you have an old POS PC that is is too slow to run the latest Windows you can just throw the latest Linux distro on it to make it all better.
I have an old test system too (460 Mhz AMD w/ 92 megs ram) and for me XP was no slower on it than most of the other distros I loaded on it. Fedora was so slow that it would hardly even let me make changes to speed things up.
Ubuntu didn’t seem half bad with some work but nothing seems to be able to hold a candle to 98se with nothing running at startup.
The rest of the review didn’t seem so bad, but since the author shot his credibility in the foot in the first paragraph how can I expect him not to be bias with the distros he is reviewing?
“nothing seems to be able to hold a candle to 98se with nothing running at startup.”
or bot-fodder as it’s otherwise known
Ummm… No.
Bot-fodder? Surely you jest! Or at the very least aren’t as up on your information as you could be. Head over to MSFN’s Unofficial Service Pack forum area:
[ http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showforum=91 ]
…and see all the great hacks they’ve done to the system to make it secure and (believe it or not) pretty. I’d also imagine if the Laptop came with its original system disks you could probably even manage to squeeze out better battery life than your standard untweaked NT 5.x based OSes…
That said, if you simply must have an NT5.x OS on it I’d have probably gone with Fred Vorck’s method of removing IE from Windows 2000 and slipstreaming the Unoffical Service pack 5 into the thing. Depending on the hardware support its possible Linux might not be the best choice for these older machines….
It all depends on what you want to do with them.
–bornagainpenguin
In the article: “Why must these distros insist on rebranding Firefox?”
Does the author read the news?
Edited 2006-10-05 09:51
He doesn’t mention how usable and responsive the machine is with such heavy DEs. As someone who has a Celeron 433 laptop with 256 MB RAM, I’m highly suspicious that the latest Linux distros run acceptably.
As someone who once had Celeron 266 with 128M of RAM, I can say that KDE ran on it just fine with all eye candy (I repeat, all – effects, animation, desktop background, K menu picture etc.) switched off and a light widget style chosen.
We must have very different definitions of fine
I’ve run GNOME on my P2/400 128MB laptop for years now. I switched to Xfce temporarily but in the end I preferred the features of GNOME to the small speed boost I got from Xfce. I was doing some work on the system just a few hours ago, proofing some xml files in gedit. Either I have a higher tolerance for slowness than most people, or very current distros (my laptop runs MDV Cooker) are okay…
Debian and Slackware seem to scale reasonably well.
Also, Xubuntu would have been worth of trying.
Xubuntu would have been worth of trying
One of his requirements was KDE. Xubuntu is XFCE.
It’s a pity the author didn’t experiment with different window managers such as Xfce, fluxbox, etc. Imho, this is the way to get reasonably fast desktop performance and a smaller ram footprint on older hardware. The downside is they require a bit more knowledge of Linux than Gnome or KDE and so are not so easy for new users, ime. If you want a fully-loaded desktop using Gnome or KDE then Linux really needs at least a p4 or Athlon and 512 megs of ram, I think.
Too bad the author didn’t try out Zenwalk which sounds very good. And kudos to him for reminding SuSE and Fedora that a single install CD Ubuntu-stylee would be a very good idea.
Zenwalk is nice, too bad the package managment is downright scary…
I agree, xfce could be an ideal candidate for such a computer. I would probably run xubuntu instead of zenwalk, with the loss of some (not much) speed. This way you can apt-get insted of netpkg. It’s still pretty lightweight.
Another candidate (a not very nubie friendly one though) is arch linux with kde. Very snappy. Also i686 is pentium pro and higher, so that pIII would fit the bill. It’s the fastest, low footprint, kde desktop i’ve ever tried out.
Do note that archlinux is _not_ in the same league as those he reviewed, as it’s not a point’and’click->configure distro.
Too bad the author didn’t try out Zenwalk which sounds very good. And kudos to him for reminding SuSE and Fedora that a single install CD Ubuntu-stylee would be a very good idea.
The method is already available with the use of bootdisk image via CD or Flash drive. The only requirement is to get the url of the mirror server to proceed for the installation. Here is an example:
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/5/i386/os/i…
Given the versatile nature of Fedora (or openSuse), they are not aiming to be desktop specific which means can choose to customise in workstation, desktop or server. Those are lacking in Ubuntu which is really a desktop specific distribution.
For people who are still using dial-up connect (they are still the majority worldwide), providing more CDs or a single DVD suits them well if they are looking to install packages later therefore a single CD install won’t be effficient.
This is way beyond what an old system can do. Even GNOME is a better choice than KDE speed wise. But on that old system (PIII) the best thing to install is one of the window maker-like GUI instead.
Besides, he could get all that he mentioned by just installing XP with SP2 and run its firewall, and then not install any harmful application. and he will enjoy huge speed compared to any linux distro that exist, all judged by real life, not hypothetically.
This is way beyond what an old system can do. Even GNOME is a better choice than KDE speed wise. But on that old system (PIII) the best thing to install is one of the window maker-like GUI instead.
Can I have some of this stuff that you´ve been smoking? GNOME is almost unusable on anything below 1Ghz whereas KDE used to fly on my old Celeron 800 Mhz with only 384 Mb that I retired only because the mobo died, otherwise I´d probably be using it to this day (due to financial constraints ;-)). GNOME did improve on this regard on the latest releases but it is nowhere near KDE. Not yet.
But I agree that XFCE or some of the alternative window managers out there would be a better call on such machine.
“Can I have some of this stuff that you´ve been smoking? GNOME is almost unusable on anything below 1Ghz whereas KDE used to fly on my old Celeron 800 Mhz with only 384 Mb that I retired only because the mobo died, otherwise I´d probably be using it to this day (due to financial constraints ;-)). GNOME did improve on this regard on the latest releases but it is nowhere near KDE. Not yet.”
That’s funny considering that Ubuntu runs just fine on my HP Pavilion n5150 with a PIII 600 and 256MB. Of course, if I tried to run anything memory intensive like Amarok and Picasa at the same time, then there’s a huge decrease in performance. But, from having used both Kubuntu and Ubuntu on it, I didn’t really see any difference one way or the other between the performance of KDE and Gnome.
I have Dapper running on my young daughter’s 800mhz PC with only 256mb of RAM and it works fine. Not super speedy, but she uses all the usual Gnome apps as well as OOo, Firefox, does web development using Bluefish, plays lots of games, does photo editing with Gimp, watches movies and even does 3D animation with Blender on it. However Java apps like JEdit won’t run. It definitely would improve with another 256mb of RAM–no question about it.
Edited 2006-10-05 17:02
GNOME is almost unusable on anything below 1Ghz.
Really?
Because it ran quite snappily on my PowerBook G3 500/512 with 8mb video ram.
(The only reason I switched to Xubuntu is because I grabbed the wrong disk when a corrupt upgrade forced a wipe and re-install. The only substantial difference I notice is that Xubuntu is very quick to boot and shut down.)
I totally agree with you about performance of KDE. KDE works surprisingly well on slightly older hardware given enough ram and GPU. My primary desktop is Suse 10.1 with KDE on an AMD 750 mhz system. With 1 GB of RAM and ATI 128 MB video card it works just fine. I use it for QT development with KDevelop among other things and its quite snappy. It is however sluggish on fullscreen flash videos but thats not KDE’s fault.
Hmm. Funny, I use KDE but when I was using GNOME it was faster than KDE and worked fine on 512MB. I still prefer KDE, though, which is why I switched back.
The author did a pretty good review of the distros being considered. But he didn’t say much about how well they actually performed on the hardware. Most folks would like to know if the machine was usable on day-to-day tasks with that configuration.
His 600 MHz P3 could do fairly well if he upped the RAM a bit, even if running XP.
I have an old K6-2 400MHz laptop with 128 MB memory that runs Xubuntu. But it is slow. It can be used for one-app-at-a-time tasks like browsing, email, and light word processing. But I would not recommend that system to anyone. Even linux can’t save everything!
All-in-all, a good article.
I agree, the RAM will have been the main limiting factor on that machine.
[running Kubuntu 6.06lts on a PIII 800 – 384mb here]
I’ve just recently bought a – what you would call – old T23 for my sister. I upped it’s memory to 512 and KDE 3.5.4 (on top of debian etch) is running on it like a charm.
Till about half a year ago I used an old Ominbook 500’s upper part (not the dock, too heavy), 700mhz piii with 128 megs of ram for taking it to conferences and such (hey, it was small and light). I ran Gnome on it (on top of debian sid, so yes, a recent version of it). It didn’t blow me away with its speed, but it was running fairly ok.
Generally, on such hw fluxbox and xfce can run without problems. Other stuff can be also run on them, but please, pretty please, ask someone knowledgeable to do the install and the config to make it as memory-light as possible and turn off everything not necessary.
As always, just dumping a big chunk of meat on the fire won’t make a delicious dinner, you have to take your time with it.
Why doesn’t he test the distros that are made for running on weak hardware? Like Xubuntu, Zenwalk, Slax, Gentoo, Puppet and such…
And why does he rate the apps? Shouldn’t this be a hardware-only analyzis? And why did he just skip Mandriva? He could have just turned AIGLX off instead of whining about it not working.
Well, the idea was good. But the choices of distros were bad.
No, the system should have turned it off for him, or not have it on by default. This isn’t the 90s anymore, all the basics should just work out of the box. If they can’t make them do that, then obviously the technology isn’t ready yet.
According to some review of Mandriva 2007 RC1, I read, the feature was added by choice of the user. I’m not sure if this has changed… ? Seems stupid, though. Otherwise I’d regard Mandriva 2007 as one of the biggest steps forward for commercial desktop linux.
i686 optimized including a snappy X11, a plethora of full desktop environments/light weight window managers, pacman package manager, quick boot time, wpa wifi support via wpa_supplicant. You want salsa with that?
I agree frugal is a great choice for an “older” lappy like that one. Getting network manager and its front ends built on it is a pita, though. Even after stealing the PKGBUILDS from Arch’s AUR it took hours for me to get working at all, and it’s still semi-broken. Very few non-uber-geeks will be interested in doing wpa from the cmd line. Also, if he complains that mepis has a small community, then he’d probably consider FWs nonexistent.
I have an IBM Thinkpad T21 with 192MB RAM and a 40GB HD
and I am a very happy using debian on it.
And XFCE loads extremely fast, so it’s like 30sec from cold start to desktop.
Which distro, and what services? Your choice of desktop isn’t going to be the limiting factor at boot time, generally. That said, I run XFCE on an old iBook Toilet Seat, and it’s great.
Debian of course, and no services, not even Cups or firewall or sshd.
Custom kernel of course, it does make a difference.
the title and intro of the article lead me to believe it was going to be helpful to me as i have laptop that is definitely not getting vista on it. i have yet to find a distro that can suspend and hibernate on my fairly common HP laptop.
but alas it’s just another distro mini review article with no regard to how they did with the laptop. no mention of performance either.
I don’t think the author of this article is exactly qualified to be rating distros. He doesn’t even sound like he knows much about Linux. That’d be like paying someone who has just taken his first drink of alcohol to write an article about the different types of drinks out there.
For an old laptop like that, you’re better off with a smaller distro than one of those big n00b-friendly distros. Arch Linux would’ve worked great on that thing. Of course, he did tried Kubuntu, which is based Ubuntu which is based on Debian, so it was a somewhat good choice.
XFCE would’ve been so much better on that thing too. Xubuntu or Arch Linux with XFCE installed or even Zenwalk would fly on that laptop.
Edited 2006-10-05 12:18
I don’t think the author of this article is exactly qualified to be rating distros. He doesn’t even sound like he knows much about Linux.
OK, but it has kind of a Windows-guy-discovering-Linux appeal. Hopefully other Windows guys will have their interest awakened.
not really compareable, but we’ve had a LAMP server running for 1.5 years non-stop, on a 550 MHz PIII with 384 MBytes memory. It outperformed a W2K3 SBE hands down on the same network with 1 GB memory and 2.8 GHz PIV. Of course, it was at runlevel 3. SUSE 9.x
It then was decided to have the linux server run on new hardware…. that of the now defunct SBE….
My laptop is a P3 733 with 192MB RAM and windows XP runs fine on it. Only problems is that I can’t install photoshop on it.
Ok, repeat after me: Linux is a kernel.
Linux != KDE/Gnome/Amarok/Evolution
Ok, I figured it would be important to get that out of the way. Yeah, Win98Se will run great.
Vector would absolutely fly – use XFCE, IceWM, or any of the others. There you go! Secure, up-to-date, flexible, free…
Even Xubuntu would handle this with EASE.
It’s almost FUD, but I don’t believe the author knew any better…Still, even if you googled “Linux on an old pc” you’d get dsl, puppy, vector, etc.
This can be damaging though – the whole “Linux can’t run on an old PC any better than windows!” is a bunch of crap.
Boot into a bash terminal and tell me it won’t run
Will Distro A Configuration B work well? Maybe not. Will B and C? Yes. And that’s simultaneously the greatest strength for linux and it’s biggest stumbling block.
Ah well. I can get a beat up old p2 233 with 64mb of RAM to boot directly into a GUI running Amarok in a roomies car – and it plays wonderfully. Did I mention it does it in 20-30 seconds?
Ok, repeat after me: Linux is a kernel.
Linux != KDE/Gnome/Amarok/Evolution
Yeah, but most people tend to look at the entire package as L-I-N-U-X writ large, since the kernel isn’t all that useful by itself.
Well, that in and of itself is not unreasonable. Hence some people’s usage of the term GNU/Linux (since it’s Linux Kernel and GNU tools)
Even including a GUI etc isn’t unreasonable. What IS unreasonable is comparing the performance of KDE 3.5.2 to Windows 98 on the same computer (Not saying this is exactly what happened, but still!)
KDE and Gnome are considered “heavy” (though nowhere near Vista of course).
XFCE, Flux, IceWM, etc…Are not.
He probably should’ve done a bit more research (read: google light linux distro or something similar, or checked distrowatch and read up a bit…)
I’ve been waiting for someone to build a desktop oriented distro that is based on Arch Linux. Underground Desktop seems to be just what the doctor ordered, but I may wait for it to mature a bit before I’ll test it. The default DE in Underground Desktop is KDE.
About Underground Desktop: http://www.ludos.org/portal/node/15
Installation and desktop screenshots: http://www.ludos.org/portal/image/tid/9
A new alpha release of Underground Desktop has just come out today: http://www.ludos.org/portal/node/222
you are right, kde is not close to win2k, its far ahead that of any windows versions.
He’s trying to find something to run well on an old PC and he picks six distributions which are all KDE based… What are we supposed to learn from this? That KDE based distributions tend to run about the same on older hardware?
I could have already told you that!
http://www.fluxbuntu.com/
not quite ready yet, but it may well be the answer to old hardware quite soon.
This dude centered his selection on distros with KDE by default, and he writes he wants KDE as a DM.
It seems he just wanted to get his familiar environment as quickly as possible and with the less efforts required… Quite understable, though maybe not the best idea as the softwares he selected are not the lightest ones…
I use a Dell Ispiron 7000 (PII 400Mhz) and I replaced :
– KDE by Fluxbox
– Firefox by links2 (useful when it’s just to download sources of a software…). I plan to install Kazehakase but fail to compile it at the moment…
– Thunderbird by Sylpheed
– AmaroK by XMMS
– OO.o by Abiword and Siag Office (for the speadsheet)
– Kate by Nedit
– Acroread by XPDF.
Though some of these applications may have less functionnalities or be a bit less visual appealing, it’s OK for my use and the laptop works pretty well…
Edited 2006-10-05 16:24
They need to change the name to “flubuntu”. Fluxbuntu is just too hard to say.
I’ve got a 450mhz compaq laptop that runs gentoo with fvwm like a speed demon, and I get to run multiple apps like firefox / thunderbird / abiword all at once because of the memory i save by running a lightweight wm. i’m not a lightweight wm zealot; i use kde on my home machine, but there are options for slower computers other than kde/gnome and window managers that use less memory than even xfce.
What does he consider to be a modern linux distro? On that particular configuration I would have went with Slackware. I have a 233mhz 92mb of ram laptop and have Slack 10 loaded on it. It works incredibly well given the speed of it. For a window manager I use Openbox then all the apps like xchat, gaim, firefox. The other reason for selecting slackware is that it allows me to compile applications from source, create a package, and install or remove it with ease.
I don’t know where people gets this FUD from. KDE is great for an old machine like this. It uses less resources than GNOME, and is faster. On top of that it is much easier to disable many features.
The problem though is that KDE needs memory much more than it needs CPU. Running with less than 256Mb is suboptimal.
My current KDE session uses 100Mbyte in total, so it would run nicely on such a machine, but starting a few Firefox (an additional 50Mbyte) would kill the performance.
With a DE like KDE or Gnome I can’t see it preforming any better than Windows. Now if you go with a lightweight distro with a light weight DE just as Fluxbox, xfce and use lightweight applications then I would think you would see some gains. That or you could just drop all DE’s together and use CLI!
I have XP pro on Gateway solo, PII 366MHz 128MB RAM and 8G HD. I successfully installed XP pro within 1 hr alongwith peripheral softwares. Used XP GUI with NO fancy effects, no unnecessary services to start. Pagefile usage_memory is 250-300MB total when running FF, Word and Media player. It takes 30 sec to open any app but I can spare that time. Also ALL my peripherals workes perfect.
Come to linux, i can’t even install 686 kernel. Only installable option is Slackware, kanotix, PCLOS and debian. All other distros, including Ubuntu just failed to install at all. (needs at least 192M memory??)
Then problem starts..
wireless works on PCLOS but not on debian or kanotix. Printer works on kanotix but not sound card
Something works on one distro but not other..Spent lot of precious family time to struggle getting working anything right..
Who to blame.. distro, hardware, kernel, drivers, my knowledge…??? Above posts have started blame games on KDE GNOME/memory and what not.. like Screaming my ASS is red one and not yours…
Went back to XP on which every peripheral works perfectly even on this old laptop….and KDE GUI is not even close to W2K GUI in terms of EASE OF USE
Edited 2006-10-05 18:50
Who to blame.. distro, hardware, kernel, drivers, my knowledge…??? Above posts have started blame games on KDE GNOME/memory and what not.. like Screaming my ASS is red one and not yours…
Went back to XP on which every peripheral works perfectly even on this old laptop….and KDE GUI is not even close to W2K GUI in terms of EASE OF USE
That’s a BOLD CONTENTION. Care to BACK IT UP?
I sell used laptops, and I have found DSL, _Darned_ Small Linux
, to be a great choice on older laptops. Firefox fox runs very quickly on older machines, even with 64MB. DSL is not just for live CD booting.
Note: In my first attempt to install standard versions of apps like Firefox, Thunderbird, and Acrobat Reader, I used apt-get to install ubuntu-desktop, in order to equip my system with a full set of gtk libraries, and then configured KDE as the system’s default desktop. Following that, I was able to successfully install apps that required gtk library dependencies, such as standard versions of Acrobat Reader, Firefox, and Thunderbird. Later, however, I reinstalled Kubuntu and used Adept to download and install Acrobat Reader, Firefox, and Thunderbird from the Kubuntu-standard repositories, which went without a hitch. However, my preference is to have the gtk libraries installed, so that “standard” versions of popular programs will generally work without requiring special Kubuntu versions (use: apt-get install gnome-desktop)
Wait, what? I wasn’t aware that Kubuntu had special versions of GTK+… unless he means he wanted to have ALL the GTK+ libraries wheras installing each program would only bring in the ones they specifically needed.
That said, I don’t think Kubuntu has its own repositories… I’m running Xubuntu and all my repositories say Ubuntu (except for the one I added to bring in the latest amaroK)
I bought an old Omnibook P3 500 during May. I installed Ubuntu LTS as soon as it was available.
I’ve been using it for 3 months now. At first I thought it was great, even though boot time, application launch time seemed oddly long.
I never liked Linux very much, because of the great mees it seems on the hard drive, and the relatively hard times you have when you must dive into the scripts (always differents between distro and distro versions).
But I don’t have much time to solve problems, and my Ubuntu began swapping to death after 20 minutes since last week. I even encountered some system freezings.
So I decided to try FreeBSD 6.1 with KDE. I was very pleased with the overall speed (boot time 1/3 faster, application launch time about the half, when not instantaneous!), but I must admit I can’t do many things at the same time: since I only have 128Mo, the system goes frequently swapping hard.
But FreeBSD seemed much more clean than a Linux distro.
Nevertheless, I think my computer has a problem with ubuntu. I don’t think it is possible to have such a huge performance gap between Linux and FreeBSD (even on network or disk copy). Moreover, configuring FreeBSD for basic things is very nice, but I still don’t have automount or other.
Conclusion: I still need to investigate for the best distro. Problem is: when do you know you have the best distro? How long does it takes to configure your computer?