[CS-FSLUG] Cramming and Jamming

[Ed Hurst]

In many ways, the true test of a Linux distro is whether it will work
on older hardware. Further, the test is whether it will be useful. My
old Gateway Solo 2500 is a pretty fair test bed for such things.
Because it is not my main machine, I can afford to hose the file system
and replace the installation as needed. It has an i686-266Mhz, 160MB
RAM, a 4.2GB harddrive, CD-ROM, optical mouse, and Prism chipset
wireless ethernet card.

As a baseline, I've run RedHat 7.3 on it for quite some time. It runs
plenty fast, and updates are available through the Fedora Legacy
Project. The one serious drawback is failure to recognize my wireless
pcicard without some serious tweaking. However, it is noteworthy KDE
3.0 ran quite fast on this setup.

I've also run FreeBSD 4.12, which is almost as quick, and slightly more
stable. However, it shares RH7's flaws of not supporting too many
pcicards. Also, getting the most out of FreeBSD requires rebuilding the
system for optimization. Bumping up to FreeBSD 5.4 slowed things down a
bit, and rebuild times were more than doubled. Notably, "buildworld"
takes 13 hours. However, the pcicards are immediately recognized. I
tried NetBSD's latest, too, but just didn't know enough to configure
the thing to run too well. I note the boot/install kernel exhibited an
astounding level of hardware detection, easily rivalling or surpassing
Knoppix.

So far, every Debian-based system has had trouble displaying properly
on the LCD screen. Knoppix ran the text on the console one or two lines
below the bottom of the screen, as did Debian 3.0. Otherwise, they ran
fairly fast in terms of responsiveness, about equal to FreeBSD 5.4.
Knoppix 3.4 couldn't ID the wifi card; while 3.6 found it and tried to
set it up, it failed to make a connection. However, the signal failure
was Ubuntu 5.10. First, I don't like installers that give me no choice
in package selection. Second, while it had no trouble identifying and
setting up my home wireless LAN, it insisted on installing from that
source, not the disk. Finally, once installed, Ubuntu had a horrifying
visual lag. The pointer jumped around somewhere near 1/2-sec. behind
the movements of the mouse. Boot times and screen loading just made it
unusable. Ubuntu's latest is *fat*. Libranet 2.7 installed and ran
nice, but couldn't find the wireless. Libranet 2.8.1 simply refused to
install. I can't identify the error. I had one copy from someone else,
burned more than one copy carefully, and other disks burned the same
way on the same hardware worked fine.

The one distro so far to come closest to usefullness was SUSE 9.3.
Hardware detection was flawless from the start. I was offered the
chance to bypass the heavy desktops and run Fvwm2 (from which I
downloaded and installed IceWM). However, it was almost as slow as
Ubuntu. The difference was at least the display didn't lag. However,
every action took awhile to churn out results, as there was heavy
swapping for just about everything.

The biggest disappointment was Vector SOHO. It would have taken the
entire harddrive just to install, so I bypassed it. Also, CentOS 4,
while it did install, refused to setup the wifi properly, and appears
to dislike LCDs. There was no obvious X setup option for the proper
settings, and I had to adjust the xorg.conf by hand. It ran almost as
slow as SUSE 9.3. I left out Puppy Linux because it has no build
packages and uses none of the X drivers, relying entirely on the
framebuffer. Other lightweight distros had similar drawbacks. (Don't
even ask, Eduardo.)

As I write this, I'm in the process of installing Kanotix. I'll add a
sequel to describe that.

-- 
Ed Hurst
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Plain & Simple Computer Help -- http://ed.asisaid.com/
Plain Package blog -- http://ed.asisaid.com/blog/