XFCE Ubuntu 6.06.1 on 120Mhz Pentium 1 + 48Mb + 1.5Gb

[K.Mandla]

Good point. Next time I shall include a cereal-spitting disclaimer.

[jdong]

Perhaps one day it shall become a toaster, and make small children happy by giving them warm toast to eat. ...

No, no, that's called a Pentium 4 Prescott... and you can use the leftover energy to blow-dry your hair, too

[PatrickMay16]

And if X/Ubuntu seems sluggish, try Zenwalk or something similar. Ubuntu on the 120Mhz machine was completely irrational, totally irresponsible and utterly ridiculous. But there are plenty of distros that are tuned for hardware even that old.

****-BENIS. Hello there.

Let me tell you. My brother left lying around a computer with an AMD K6-2 150MHz, and 256MB RAM. So I was messing around with it.
Now, I could get Ubuntu running kind of usable on it as a desktop, but I had to use the lightest programs possible.

I turned off all the unneeded services, used IceWM for the window manager, links2 with the -g option for web browsing, XMMS for playing audio, and rox-filer for drawing a desktop and managing files.
I also tried using GAIM, which was kind of slow but good enough to use.

So it worked alright, actually, though I understand that most people will probably want to use a more full-featured web browser. I tried using Mozilla, but it was awfully slow and therefore unusable. I imagine the same goes for firefox.

Here's a screenshot of that machine once I got it going nicely.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...guy/penoch.jpg

EDIT: Oh, BTW, I used Breezy and did a server install.

[K.Mandla]

Right on! That's a winner. That wallpaper is mighty crazy, though.

If I had a proper mouse I might have pushed this one a little more. I'm sniffing around for something of the same caliber that doesn't have the same hardware issues so I can build it up proper. Just in the interest of science, of course.

We should have a contest: Best GUI on the slowest machine. With a 64Mb ceiling on memory and a 166Mhz cap on processor speed. Disk space is irrelevant.

We can call it the MinBuntu Challenge!

Winner gets all the losers shipped to them at their expense.

[jdong]

With hardware resources that low, realistically you'd want to be using almost a pure GTK1 environment... Either choose carefully from ubuntu repositories, or go with a distribution designed for old hardware (Puppy, Vector, Feather, DSL, and so on)


Personally, I'd recommend turning such systems into servers or other textmode appliances. The GPU is likely too weak to provide any meaningful performance... maybe MARGINAL performance as an X terminal to another machine, but don't expect a great performer out of a 166 with a 2MB video card

[JohnW]

Wow, this story has given me courage to install Xubuntu on a Celeron 433MHz, with 160MB ram, and a 4.3GB hd...

Should be fine, I've got three 350MHz machines standing side by side at the moment, trying to get Openvpn bridging going between them. One has the same 160Mb of ram as yours, perfectly usable.

I installed from the alternate 6.06.1 Xubuntu cd, because that's what I always use now, but I guess even the gui installer would have worked on such a massive amount of ram!

[JohnW]

...The only real problem is that Turbo's only mouse connection is via serial port. And I don't have a proper serial mouse (my adapters don't seem to work), so I'm mouseless. Which makes things a little difficult to use. ...

Brilliant post, K.Mandla!

Isn't that mouse issue understated though? A little difficult??? I couldn't even get to square one, the top panel Application menu. Many distros have a shortcut as standard for this, such as ctrl+escape. Has a bug report already been submitted on this? (I'm a beginner, I've not yet figured out how to do bugzilla).

I looked to see where you're located. If it had been UK I'd have sent you a spare serial mouse!

[jdong]

ALT+F1 is the KDE/GNOME standard shortcut for the main application menu.

[JohnW]

ALT+F1 is the KDE/GNOME standard shortcut for the main application menu.

Fine with me.

Though you might have trouble getting the xfce guys to accept alt+f1, it's already used to get documentation.

I don't mind whether it's alt+f1 or ctrl+escape, as long as there is at least one such shortcut and there's a visual cue first time the system is booted (e.g. a dialog box).

Right now I think xfce has no shortcut for this, which seems like the worst possible choice for a guy without a mouse.

[K.Mandla]

Right now I think xfce has no shortcut for this, which seems like the worst possible choice for a guy without a mouse.

I think you're right. I tried to surf around for keyboard shortcuts for XFCE before switching to Ratpoison, but didn't find much. I also tried that "right-click" key that most keyboards have. No dice.

It's not a big deal, but it did kind of hamstring XFCE, which otherwise is my No-1 fav DE!!!!!!111oneonene