[plug] Newby with SUSE 6.2 on a P100/16Meg

[Beau Kuiper]

On Sat, 29 Jul 2000, James Tan wrote:
> 
> Hello comrades,
> 
> I have to say, I've done a little fiddling around with Debian/RH4.? some time ago
> out of curiousity on my lowly 386s and 486s and now I've purchased [on a sale at Carousel] a copy of SUSE 6.2 [probably a little dated by now] just to see how
> it runs [after all I've heard quite a bit about the performance of Linux on leaner
> PCs] on my P100 with 16Megs RAM.  I'm aware that Linux itself is fast but the
> GUI is a resource hog so I'm probably gonna get my fingers dirty to get to learn
> some Linux. I have two beefier PCs running windoze 2k and 98 and since I'm don't want to mess up my HDs I'd better install SUSE on a separate machine just in case something could go wrong.  Could someone tell me whether this P100 with
> 16Megs RAM is enuff for GUI/X stuff without significant HD thrashing in the virtual
> memory ?  I want to start getting into Linux with mininal risk.

Unless you stay at the command line, or do very little in X, 16meg of ram is
going to hurt somewhat under linux. X is huge, bloated and plain slow. If you
MUST run X on this machine, get used to using a very simple window manager
(fvwm or blackbox, or window-maker in a pinch) and NOT using netscape 4.X :-).
Do not run gnome, or kde, as they are garrenteed to thrash your system into
oblivion :-) AND ABOVE ALL, DON"T START STAROFFICE ON IT UNLESS YOU HAVE
A WEEK TO WAIT FOR IT!!!!!!!! (sorry for shouting)

Just my experience, with having to put up with slow computers with little ram.
Beau Kuiper
kuiperba at cs.curtin.edu.au