[xubuntu-users] Old laptop, was:(no subject)

[David Curtis]

On Wed, 18 Mar 2009 10:59:59 +0000
Chris Ross <kristoff101 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have the following hardware
> Sony Picturebook PCG-C1XD
> Pentium II 400 MHz
> 128 MB Ram
> 10Gb HDD
> USB floppy
> PCMCIA CD Drive
> Display adapter Neomagic Magicmedia 256AV
> 
> Due to the amount of available Ram I wonder whether or not I should go with
> release 8.1 given the recommended config below, or go for an earlier
> version.
> 
> I will be using the laptop to browse and possible use with skype.
> 
> I understand that installing should be done using the alternative installer
> given the limited amount of memory.
> 
> 8.10, (Intrepid Ibex) - "Xubuntu can run with starting from 192 (or even
> just 128) MB RAM, but it is strongly recommended to have at least 256 MB
> RAM"
> 

Chris,

Your not going to see much difference between 8.04 and 8.10, or even 9.04 when the time comes for that matter. Of course everything else is gonna see End of Life real soon.

Browsing is the sticky spot. Anything that uses the gecko (mozilla) engine, and that's everything that's stable and usable right now, has a big mem footprint (for 128 MB machines), expect lots of swap space usage, which means sloooooowness.

I've never used skype, but I'd suggest that low quality audio should not be a prob as long as thats the only thing running.

I'd advise getting a cheap netbook for what use you've just described. And I should take my own advice as I run LXDE on top of a barebones cli install on a PII 266 w/96 MB. Great for mail/irc but Firefox is out of the question.  I have to put up with alpha midori. 
-- 
David Curtis <dcurtis at uniserve.com>