On Fri, 18 Sep 2009, Nicolas Bigaouette wrote:
2009/9/18 Dimitrios Apostolou <jimis@xxxxxxx>
On Thu, 17 Sep 2009, Nicolas Bigaouette wrote:
I'm using Arch on a old Sony Vaio: pentium II 200MHz with ~64MB of ram. It
Cool, especially since you have desktop software on it... How did you
manage to install with only 64MB RAM?
Note that I'm not sure how much RAM I have. I might have more, like 80MB,
but not much more. I can verify tonight. I remember trying to access the web
with it (with arora I think), it was possible but really slow, and forget
about tabs.
Just FYI you might want to try the following tips to speed things up, they
work in my case:
* forget about XDM/GDM/KDM and use startx, or a direct autologin from
/etc/inittab!
* Don't run LXDE, GTK+ 2.x is way too heavy for such hardware. My choice
for window manager is JWM, recompiled with minimal dependencies, together
with a script to auto-generate the menu from *.desktop files (I can post
this if you need it).
* Try my PKGBUILD for rxvt, today even xterm has antialiased fonts which
is too much for this old hardware
* Command line mail client (alpine is my personal choice)
* Dillo 2 or links-g (started with "links -g") for web browser.
Unfortunately that's not enough to provide the full web2 experience so
when I'm open to alternatives you may suggest ;-)
As for installation, it was a pain. Mainly because this laptop does not have
a cd drive, and does not support booting from USB... When I got that
machine, debian was on it with grub. So I copied the usb thumb drive image's
kernel to the hd, added an entry for this kernel in grub, and booted the fs
on the usb drive. Started installation, wiped-out debian and only have arch
now. Put back arch's grub and its configuration, and "that's it"... ;)
awesome way to install :-)
Dimitris
P.S. Oh, did I mention sysctl vm.swappiness=0?
