[arch-general] archlinux on old hardware

[David C. Rankin]

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 <jimis at gmx.net> 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
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