At Fri, 26 Feb 2010 13:31:44 +0000, Chris G wrote:

On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 08:45:55PM +0000, Simon Royal wrote:

...

Hi.

I have been running Puppy Linux on my ThinkPad 600 for a few days. It is the best distro I have tried on it in terms of speed, but it is a little limited. The software repositories are small and getting sound to work is a pain.

It is a 300Mhz ThinkPad 600 and at present it only has 160MB of RAM. When I first got it, I wanted to run some kind of *buntu distro. I know Ubuntu probably will never run on it, so I was looking around at lighter versions.

I ran Crunchbang for a little while, but even that struggled.

Would adding another 128MB of RAM make a lot of difference or is it more of the processor speed that is making this machine slow?

The hard drive in it is a 4200RPM drive, would upping it to 5400 or 7200RPM drive make any difference? It did in an Apple PowerBook I had about a year ago.

Would Xubuntu run comfortable on a 300Mhz with 288MB of RAM?

What would your advice be. What do you lot recommend. I don't have any money to buy a new laptop so I need to get as much out of this as I can.

I have eeebuntu running on an old EEEPC and its fine in general.

How about trying the Ubuntu netbook remix, well supported as a mainstream Ubuntu release, see http://www.canonical.com/projects/ubuntu/unr etc.

But the Ubuntu Netbook Remix isn't optimised for old hardware. It's just an alternative to the normal GNOME configuration and optimised for small screens. -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Richard Lewis ISMS, Computing Goldsmiths, University of London Tel: +44 (0)20 7078 5134 Skype: richardjlewis JID: ironchicken@jabber.earth.li http://www.richard-lewis.me.uk/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- +----------------------------------------------+ | Support open access to scholarship | | http://freeculture.org/ http://www.doaj.org/ | +----------------------------------------------+

Chris G wrote:

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But the Ubuntu Netbook Remix isn't optimised for old hardware. It's just an alternative to the normal GNOME configuration and optimised for small screens.

... and not very whizzy processors. OK, it's not *specifically* for slow hardware but the original EEEPC is hardly a speed freak and it runs fine on there.

The Atom and Via chips in netbooks are still a great deal faster than a 300mhz Mobile PII machine, as is the rest of the system. Remember we have 66mhz bus speeds here, and the underlying gnome will have no room at all to breathe in 160MB of ram. Also I seem to recall that the UNR task browser interface (which is after all pretty much the only difference between UNR and vanilla Ubuntu) pretty much requires hardware accelerated 3D on a compiz compatible chipset. Or at least runs very very slowly without it. I'll stand with Richard on this one UNR would be a perfectly horrible experience on this machine, assuming it ran at all.