Just a few comments on Live CD's: Graphical environments running from a Live CD will be very very sensitive to the amount of RAM in the system. Live CD's will run quite a bit faster if you give them a healthy dollop of swap space. That said, the sheer amount of power and features in a modern Linux Live CD over an older (almost ten years old!) system such as Windows 98 require a larger amount of RAM. Live CD's tend to throw in everything including the kitchen sink. Perhaps there's an Ubuntu variant that's specifically targeted towards low-memory machines that would be more satisfactory, especially when some swap space is available (that's a chicken-and-egg problem, of course, as it may difficult to allocate swap space until after the system is operational, which will take a long time because there isn't any swap space). One other thing that goes a long way towards helping low-memory machines to run faster is to boot from USB stick. In a 512MB laptop (with the typical very very slow CDROM drive), I boot MEPIS (a Debian variant) to fully operational in about four minutes. Booting from a USB stick, it's about fifty seconds. Unfortunately, low-memory machines are usually older, and are much less likely to support booting from USB. On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 03:09:09AM -0700, Tony Baechler wrote: > Also, while it's true that you can run Orca from the live CD, it is > very, very slow. It took at least 15 minutes to boot and several > minutes just to open an application. Yes, it could be done but frankly > it was very painful. I'm running Windows 98 on 256 MB of RAM. I'm the > first to admit that memory could be the issue, but Windows 98 runs fine > and fairly fast. OK, one could argue that of course the live CD would > be slower and Ubuntu compares to XP in terms of resources, but I would > disagree with that too, at least on a general level. Linux from the > console runs very well in that same box and from a live CD (grml 1.1rc1) > with no problem and minimal slowness. Linux by design should require > less resources than Windows, but the argument would seem to be that this > is no longer correct, at least from what I've read on the lists. _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list