Low ram & older system

[David L Norris]

On Tue, 2004-02-17 at 09:36, Alexander H.M. Ruoff wrote:
> Now I ask myself if Fedora would also work on my old K6-200 with 96 MB
> Ram? I tested the Knoppix CD and even though it is slow and I shouldn't
> "play" around with OpenOffice, KDE runs without a problem. I wonder if I
> could use a naked version of Fedora with KDE or Gnome just as a "toy"
> and maybe as a server to get into networking. 

I would not try using it as a server and a desktop at once.  If you
intend to run a desktop then I would suggest disabling every service you
don't need.  (Even sendmail if you can.)  If you use it as a server then
boot to runlevel 3.  The standard XFree86 consumes considerable memory.

GNOME should work fine on a 200 MHz with 96 MB RAM.  XFCE may run much
better.  KDE is very uncomfortable even on my K6-2 500 MHz with 256 MB
RAM.  GNOME works great on my 500 MHz.  With sufficient memory GNOME is
usable even on a system as slow as a Pentium 75 MHz.

If you don't have much RAM then you may want to install a kdrive X
server.  On this Pentium 133 laptop X memory usage dropped from 40 MB to
4 MB by switching to kdrive.  That greatly improved the performance at
the cost of some X features (missing some screensavers, opengl, cursor
shadows, etc).


I tried and failed to rebuild the XFree86 RPM with kdrive enabled as
(Mike Harris?) explained in a post last October.  So, I downloaded the
kdrive X servers from the RULE Project.  There is no kdrive server for
this laptop's Neomagic chipset and the chipset does not work with VESA. 
So, I used the kdrive Xfbdev server.  I changed grub.conf to boot with
the vga=788 kernel option (800x600x16-bit framebuffer).  In gdm.conf I
set "VTAllocation=false" and changed the X server entries to this:
/usr/X11R6/bin/Xfbdev -screen 800x600x16 -2button -dpi 84 -audit 0

-- 
 David Norris
  http://www.webaugur.com/dave/
  ICQ - 412039
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/users/attachments/20040217/395acb65/attachment-0002.bin