Old hardware brought back to life

[ibjsb4]

You should be good with 64bit. If you do run out of ram, your system will use your swap partition. If this happens, you will see an overall system slowdown as swap is way slower than ram. But with 2G, I'm thinking your good.

I have 4G ram and run 32bit, but this is because I run some software that eats up my ram and I try to stretch it out (32bit will use less). And still on rare occasion I have ran this into swap. About 64bit being faster, that also depends on the software you run and find it not to be a concern for me.

[mörgæs]

If performance and swap usage is a problem then you could take a look at post #2.

[eric13]

The 64-bit system will use more RAM for the same tasks, but should be faster.

Indeed, the 64bits takes 35% more RAM just on start! I am surprised that is that much!

I started the live CD of different distribution to give an idea of the RAM usage. CD Started on a Virtual Machine with 1 GB of RAM (tried both under Virtualbox in Debian and HyperV in Windows 8.1, they give similar results).
The RAM used on start is the one seen in "Task Manager" or with "free -m", considering the 2nd line '-/+ buffers/cache' under 'used'

Distrib	archi	kernel	RAM on start in MB
Debian Live LXDE	i686	3.2	100
Bodhi	i686	3.8	110
LXLE 12.04.4	i686	3.2	125
Lubuntu 14.04	i686	3.13	155
Lubuntu 14.04	x86_64	3.13	210
Mint 17 MATE	x86_64	3.13	400
Ubuntu 14.04	x86_64	3.13	630

Ubuntu as live CD under HyperV is so slow and almost unusable. All other reacts quite fast, especially the LXLE variants. Bodhi and LXLE are based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS ; Mint 17 is based on Ubuntu 14.04

[sudodus]

Thanks for sharing your test results

You wrote Debian Live LXLE. Do you mean Debian Live LXDE?

[JLUbunt]

Hello I have an Acorn Aspire 1 netbook, with 1 Gig of RAM, and have just put Lubuntu 14.04 LS on to it. It works well. Just wondered if Lubuntu can do the same trick as Windows 7 where a fast SD card, Scan Disc Ultra, can be used as memory. Thought this might to make it a bit faster. Is it possible? Any ideas would be appreciated.
I've noticed that Lubuntu does not have Calibre in its list of software but is in Ubuntu. I expect I'd need to learn how to install it if I want to try it.
Thanks for all the advice.

[mörgæs]

You're welcome, please distribute.

Like most other packages the install is simply

sudo apt-get install calibre

I don't know how to enable the SD card.

[famewolf]

Indeed, the installer does not work on a test VM if I set only 256MB of RAM. Too bad they did not include the alternative installer!

I just read about Zion OS 6.2 Lite, another distrib based on Lubutu 12.04 with LTS (and thus supported until 2017, though I could not find any clear statement on the website) http://zorin-os.com
I haven't tried yet, but it looks actually very good! The Lite version is supposed to run fine with only 128 MB or RAM and 266 MHz x86 processor!!
EDIT: tested on a VM, livecd then install ok with 256MB RAM. With 128 MB RAM, it did not advance so shut it down.

If you can manage to swap the hard drive and do the install on another device lxle will indeed run ok in 256mb....I had to do so for some inspiron 4000 laptops because the installer crashes.

[famewolf]

Hello I have an Acorn Aspire 1 netbook, with 1 Gig of RAM, and have just put Lubuntu 14.04 LS on to it. It works well. Just wondered if Lubuntu can do the same trick as Windows 7 where a fast SD card, Scan Disc Ultra, can be used as memory. Thought this might to make it a bit faster. Is it possible? Any ideas would be appreciated.
I've noticed that Lubuntu does not have Calibre in its list of software but is in Ubuntu. I expect I'd need to learn how to install it if I want to try it.
Thanks for all the advice.

If all else fails you can use the generic linux install [cut/paste to command line or save as "calupdate" and chmod 755 it to make it executable as it can also be used for future upgrades]:

sudo python -c "import sys; py3 = sys.version_info[0] > 2; u = __import__('urllib.request' if py3 else 'urllib', fromlist=1); 
exec(u.urlopen('http://status.calibre-ebook.com/linux_installer').read()); main(install_dir='/opt')"

[eric13]

I came a few times on that topic to prepare the install of the 12y old PC of my Dad.
I initially though to install a LXDE variant on 12.04 LTS because of issue with VGA driver (GF4 inside), but found purely by chance a GeforceFX 5200 AGP for 4€ on the bric a brac market when I was there to find a bike for a friend 2 weeks ago.
So I could successfully install Lubuntu 14.04 LTS 32 bits on that old Athlon XP PC.
I repeat the install on a 8y old Athlon64 PC of another senior few days later, this time Lubuntu 14.04 64bits since I gave him my unused 2GB of DDR2 RAM.
So both PC got migrated from Windows XP to Lubuntu, and so far, I got good feedback that their computer is faster. Wonder how good they will use it on a daily basis, but it is a good start!

[sudodus]

I came a few times on that topic to prepare the install of the 12y old PC of my Dad.
I initially though to install a LXDE variant on 12.04 LTS because of issue with VGA driver (GF4 inside), but found purely by chance a GeforceFX 5200 AGP for 4€ on the bric a brac market when I was there to find a bike for a friend 2 weeks ago.
So I could successfully install Lubuntu 14.04 LTS 32 bits on that old Athlon XP PC.
I repeat the install on a 8y old Athlon64 PC of another senior few days later, this time Lubuntu 14.04 64bits since I gave him my unused 2GB of DDR2 RAM.
So both PC got migrated from Windows XP to Lubuntu, and so far, I got good feedback that their computer is faster. Wonder how good they will use it on a daily basis, but it is a good start!

Thanks for sharing this success story