[arch-general] archlinux on old hardware

[Dimitrios Apostolou]

On Fri, 18 Sep 2009, Nicolas Bigaouette wrote:

> 2009/9/18 Dimitrios Apostolou <jimis at gmx.net>
>
>> 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?