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Hi, I think basing assessments of X resource requirements on KDE performance is a bit misleading, even on my relatively modern machine KDE drains performance like nobodies business yet X can run acceptably on quite old junk. I tend to disagree with making very general statements about recycling old machines. It all depends entirely what you want to do with them (Alice in Wonderland said that BTW). Although it's partly a testimony to the wonders of local government IT, I can do more on a 486 than a modern(ish) NT4 machine (the 486 in question gives me Perl, R and LaTeX). Certainly, I would give anything (other than my own money) to have that lot running under Gnome along with some species of emacs but blasting away at the command line and handing over pdfs lets me conduct analyses that are way beyond the capabilities of ***** council's IT system. (I will admit currently that the tex files are prepared in notepad on M$ windows, that the pdf viewer is obviously only available in M$ Windoze and also that any analysis on a particularly large data set gets prototyped at work and run at home). I accept that no-one in their right minds would put this old box forward as the ideal SOHO machine but horses for courses and all that. I can think of plenty more examples where a bit of old tack would be useful, for example I know of someone planning to provide all sorts of Unix software available from a subscription server so anything that ran an X-client (along with ssh) would be useful, and I would certainly rather have an old pc with emacs for emails at home than that Amstrad telephone thingy. Regards Paul
===== Original Message From Simon Waters <Simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> ===== Kai Hendry wrote:On ti, touko 28, 2002 at 09:56:17 +0100, jody salt wrote:I just got second hand pc (a p200 with 320 (I think) of ram) which I want to run X-windows on, I have320 RAM? A P200 is quite slow for running X. I hate seeing novices recycling machines with linux and putting X on it. New machines are really quite cheap. IMO it puts Linux in a bad light when people see something like X+KDE for the first time on a struggling pentium.I too think that the recycling old machine stuff is a bad move. Those who said you could recycle old machines originally meant as mail servers, DNS servers, file servers, that sort of thing.Win95 is honestly better. :/No it isn't. I have P200 equivalent machine (128MB of memory), and it runs KDE 1 fine, I wouldn't want KDE 2 on it I suspect, but other lighterweight Window managers should be fine. A case of circa 95/98 OSes on circa 95/98 machines. This machine is actually the minimum spec to run Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server, but I decided Linux was more advanced, and less resource hungry, and less buggy after I tried Advanced Server. Mind W2K was a lot better than Win95/98/NT4.Old machines are great for testing out the dark(console) side of linux. mutt, irssi, vim and various services. :)You can invert the console screen colours if it is too dark ;) No need to stick with green on black either these days, but it is traditional. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Paul Hewson, Postgraduate Statistics Student (part-time) School of Mathematical Sciences, Laver Building, University of Exeter, North Park Road, EXETER EX4 4QE, U.K. tel: +44 1392 382773 fax: +44 1392 382135 email: P.J.Hewson@xxxxxxxxxxxx personal home page http://www.maths.ex.ac.uk/~paulh/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.