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Re: [LUG] small distro footprints

 

On Wed, 10 Dec 2008 12:27:56 +0000
Tom Potts <tompotts@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Gordons mentioning xfce reminded me of LXDE and I was wondering if
> anyone knows of a site that compares the footprints of distros?

Recently I bought a power meter and was horrified to see that my AMD
and IPCop (P200) boxes were using nearly 200 watts (SuSE v11 + LXDE).  I
considered buying an Atom driven box but decided to give my 6 year old
Acer Aspire 1304LC, Athlon XP 1800+ laptop a new lease of life
instead.  Doubled the RAM, upgraded the hdd from 20 to 80 Mb and
replaced the DVD/CDRW drive with an all singing and dancing one.  All
for about £75 +p&p. With Xubuntu installed it whizzes along happily for
all my home usage and together with a Speedtouch router/firewall draws
a <mere> 46 watts as I type this.
 
Horses for courses!  Tried several full and mini distros, finally
settling on Xubuntu, mainly because it is Debian based and ideal for a
16Mb graphics card limit. Kubuntu with LXDE on top caused the fan to
run almost continually and was annoying, also I found the desktop is
less configurable than Xubuntu. Puppy Linux was fine but I didn't like
the idea of running it as root all the time.

My Antec cased Athlon dual core 4.2 has now been relegated to doorstop
status (unless I can figure a way of tapping into the farmer's barn
supply nearby) :)

It doesn't answer your question Tom, but I've solved my
consumption problem. Windows XP and SuSE + LXDE drew about 70 watts on
this laptop and the fan ran a large part of the time with the latter.







-- 
W.  Devon
--------------
A GNU/Linux user

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