On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 4:48 PM, Daenyth Blank wrote:

On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 17:04, Dimitrios Apostolou wrote:

...

The other is that I had trouble finding a truly lightweight X terminal (there were times when xterm was considered bloated ;) so I packaged myself rxvt. Most other distributions offer it so in case you decide to include it I attach the PKGBUILD.

rxvt is available in the AUR (which you can read about on the wiki). The repos have mrxvt and rxvt-unicode packaged as binaries.

And I think you might be able to rebuild rxvt-unicode without perl support, making it lighter

On Thu, 17 Sep 2009, Nicolas Bigaouette wrote:

I'm using Arch on a old Sony Vaio: pentium II 200MHz with ~64MB of ram. It

Cool, especially since you have desktop software on it... How did you manage to install with only 64MB RAM?

is running LXDE. It is slow to boot, but I suspend without problems (its up since a couple of month with suspend+resume each morning). It is running slow, but this machine is now my alarm clock, and it works perfectly streaming mp3 over wireless internet.

I think I have opera on it, but don't ask too much for web surfing...

Else, Arch is great! ;)

Dimitris

On Fri, 18 Sep 2009, Nicolas Bigaouette wrote:

2009/9/18 Dimitrios Apostolou

...

On Thu, 17 Sep 2009, Nicolas Bigaouette wrote:

I'm using Arch on a old Sony Vaio: pentium II 200MHz with ~64MB of ram. It

...

Cool, especially since you have desktop software on it... How did you manage to install with only 64MB RAM?

Note that I'm not sure how much RAM I have. I might have more, like 80MB, but not much more. I can verify tonight. I remember trying to access the web with it (with arora I think), it was possible but really slow, and forget about tabs.

Just FYI you might want to try the following tips to speed things up, they work in my case: * forget about XDM/GDM/KDM and use startx, or a direct autologin from /etc/inittab! * Don't run LXDE, GTK+ 2.x is way too heavy for such hardware. My choice for window manager is JWM, recompiled with minimal dependencies, together with a script to auto-generate the menu from *.desktop files (I can post this if you need it). * Try my PKGBUILD for rxvt, today even xterm has antialiased fonts which is too much for this old hardware * Command line mail client (alpine is my personal choice) * Dillo 2 or links-g (started with "links -g") for web browser. Unfortunately that's not enough to provide the full web2 experience so when I'm open to alternatives you may suggest ;-)

As for installation, it was a pain. Mainly because this laptop does not have a cd drive, and does not support booting from USB... When I got that machine, debian was on it with grub. So I copied the usb thumb drive image's kernel to the hd, added an entry for this kernel in grub, and booted the fs on the usb drive. Started installation, wiped-out debian and only have arch now. Put back arch's grub and its configuration, and "that's it"... ;)

awesome way to install :-) Dimitris P.S. Oh, did I mention sysctl vm.swappiness=0?

On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 11:39:28AM -0400, David Rosenstrauch wrote:

On 09/18/2009 11:17 AM, Dimitrios Apostolou wrote:

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* forget about XDM/GDM/KDM and use startx, or a direct autologin from /etc/inittab!

Or use qingy.

DR

or xmonad ppk

On Friday 18 September 2009 07:49:07 am Dimitrios Apostolou wrote:

On Thu, 17 Sep 2009, Daenyth Blank wrote:

...

On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 17:04, Dimitrios Apostolou wrote:

...

The other is that I had trouble finding a truly lightweight X terminal (there were times when xterm was considered bloated ;) so I packaged myself rxvt. Most other distributions offer it so in case you decide to include it I attach the PKGBUILD.

rxvt is available in the AUR (which you can read about on the wiki). The repos have mrxvt and rxvt-unicode packaged as binaries.

Thanks for the tip, I didn't search the AUR. I assumed it was deprecated because of rxvt-unicode, which is much more heavyweight. Would the devs consider including it in extra? it's one of the simplest but most basic packages available.

Dimitris

This is great info. I have a store room of old boxes that I didn't want to simply run DSL on (damn small linux) and SuSE is way too heavy (I was running 10.3 on a AMD K6 2-450 w/256M as a fax server). I haven't tried arch on the older hardware, but this sounds very encouraging. The SuSE kernel, ssh, bind, apache2, mysql, postfix, dovecot, hylafax, and ntp idled at about 77 meg, but would rapidly eat the free 180 meg and go to swap pretty quick with much activity from the webserver. I'll have to try arch on the box and compare. I've found that all distros play pretty well with anything better than a P3-800 and 512M, but you start getting below that and things go down hill fast with any desktop bigger than icewm or openbox. For any desktop, a good 256 bit graphics card really helps. You can pick up great AGP cards on ebay for ~$30 (GeForce 6800 Ultra, etc..) Will give Arch a go on the old boxes and see how they behave. Thanks. -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. Rankin Law Firm, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 Telephone: (936) 715-9333 Facsimile: (936) 715-9339 www.rankinlawfirm.com