I’m posting this bit of info for people who are considering 11.4 on old machines…
I installed openSUSE 11.4 on my old Pentium 2 350 Mhz, 256 MB RAM boxen. Everything installed fine and everything was recognized out of the box. Usability, however wasn’t fine. The machine went into constant swap. This behavior, was unlike 11.2, the previous installed version.
I re-installed 11.2 and things are good again.
I guess I’m reporting that 11.4 appears to be more resource intensive than 11.2.
The 11.4 install was a clean install, formatting /, /boot, /usr partitions. I installed the KDE desktop, along NonOSS packages.
On 2011-05-15 00:06, linuxvinh wrote:
> Usability, however wasn’t fine. The machine went into
> constant swap.
With that amount of memory, it is not surprising, specially with a modern
desktop environment. Plus, you may be hit by the search engine running the
indexing, or the preload problem that hits some people.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)
That amount of RAM I wouldn’t even try to put KDE on. LXDE maybe.
Also in general older CPUs are less energy efficient per unit of computation than newer ones. Unless you can’t upgrade because it’s a laptop or you can’t afford it, or you simply enjoy using old hardware, I’d just go for something more up to date.
I have 11.4/KDE on a machine with 768M of RAM, and that actually works pretty well for what I do on it. It has a slow older processor (not sure of the speed), and it was nearly unusable with KDE until I managed to turn off desktop effects. But, since then, it has been fine.
My older laptop, now being phased out, came with 256M of RAM, but 64M of that was apparently part of the video so it was only 192M of available RAM. I used it for a while with SuSE 10.1 and gnome. It was mostly okay, but it was slow when the updater ran (I think it was call “zen” or something similar). I disabled the updater, and did manual updates from time to time. But I concluded that it wasn’t worth trying to install opensuse 11.0 (the next version I used), unless I first added memory (which I did).
Back in 1995, I was running slackware with 16M, and fvwm. I later upgraded that to 48M, which was as high as it would go. It ran very well, and I continued to use it as my main system until around 2001.
Yes, there has been a lot of software bloat (feeping creaturism) on linux, though not nearly as much as with Windows.
While I knew of GNU/Linux since the early 1990’s when GNU/Linux distributions first started appearing, it was not until 1998 that I finally got around to installing Red Hat on my computer (which was a Compaq LTE 5200) which had only 84MB of RAM. That 84MB was the maximum amount of RAM that PC would support and that was my first GNU/Linux distribution. In 2001 I attempted to install SuSE-Pro version 7.1 (as it was called then) on this laptop, but with 84MB of RAM it was too slow.
I ended up getting my wife’s agreement to let me install SuSE-7.1 on our newer desktop (which she used most of the time) which I vaguely recall had 256MB of RAM and that was successful with the extra RAM. Eventually we purchased more computers (a separate desktop for each of us) and things became easier.
As an experiment (a five hour one at that, with a 350 Mhz machine!), I re-installed 11.4 with LXDE as the desktop. The system did perform better in regards to swap, very little or practically none at all. Unfortunately, the install wasn’t quite as nice. The sound card wasn’t recognized, which is odd since the KDE desktop install worked fine. I started on the usual things to get sound but eventually decided to go back to 11.2 since there were so many other applications and utilities that weren’t installed, that I got by default with KDE. Basically, I’d rather have an older full-featured install than a more bare-bones one. I’m in the midst of restoring 11.2 on the 350 Mhz boxen…
@ken_yap: I do have a new i7, purchased last year, that’s my primary computer now. The PII 350 Mhz is my old box, used for 11 years before I upgraded.
@please_try_again: I didn’t see your post until now so didn’t try checking the memory footprint, but your results definitely show that with KDE, I’d go into swap.
@nrickert: I used the 10.x series up to 10.3. The updater took 1+ hours to just build the list of packages on my 350 Mhz machine each time I wanted to update. I too, switched to manual updates. When I upgraded to 11.0, it was amazing. The updater was much, much improved!! It only took minutes and I left the updater to automatic notify and I updated whenever there was something new.
11.2 is by far the best version for me. All the hardware in my 350 Mhz machine was recognized on the first try. 11.0 had issues with the sound card, which oldcpu had help me through. Barring the possible memory issue with 192 MB, 11.2 would be a great upgrade for you, especially with regards to updating.
Note support for openSUSE-11.2 is about to end (in a small number of days), and it is not yet confirmed there will be an evergreen-11.2.
Reference your sound on 11.4 LXDE, I am confident that if you try again, I can help you to get it to work. In particular I have found that if you install the additional application (in 11.4) ‘pavucontrol’ and you run that once for each application and use that to tune your sound per application it will works well. In this respect with pulse audio, openSUSE-11.4 has superior configurability than 11.2. But it is DIFFERENT and the difference can take time to learn. And on a slow PC, one needs to be cautious with pulse audio, as it DOES IMHO add an overhead which can unfavourably impact older hardware’s sound functionality.
You are correct that KDE has many more features than LXDE.
But if you figure out now the applications and utilities (of KDE) that you want, you can likely also get many of those in LXDE. A little bit of research before, and IMHO you can be better prepared for your next 11.4 install effort.
I was very happy with 11.2.
I had 11.2 installed for the longest time running on my main Intel Core i7 920 PC, and only a few months before 11.4 was released did I install 11.3 with KDE on my Core i7 920. Of course a Core i7 920 with 6 GB RAM is in a different ball park than a Penitum 2 350 with 256MB of RAM.
But I have played a lot with LXDE on my sandbox PC (which has an athlon-1100) and I know it is possible to tune that desktop to be pretty good.
I would be surprised if LXDE on 11.4 is not faster than KDE on 11.2.
I have lots of old hardware here too, and I waste too much time trying out distros on them. Generally I put something like Crunchbang on low RAM machines. I have a 1.7GHz laptop with a dead battery that has only 256MB RAM because I’m too cheap to go look for a used DDR SODIMM. It’s low power so I use it as a thin client. Works fine. I can even stream movies to it using xbmc to watch. Bandwidth is not a problem at all, it even has a Gb NIC.
My openSUSE box is a PIII 1ghz machine with 512mb. LXDE 11.4 currently has 9.6% free RAM and 88.4% free swap according to nmon which I just downloaded and compiled from Sourceforge. It’s been up 5 days at this point, just for reference.
Also, I nearly forgot to mention my experience with my Debian/Mepis/antiX based laptop - 650mhz 256mb. I was running LXDE on there but had problems with it so I’m using IceWM now. That seems to be a lot faster! Conky’s showing 40% RAM free, no swap usage. I’d definitely want to run IceWM on a 350mhz machine.
That would be good to see. From what I have read on the mailing list, they really want 2 volunteer packagers to support 11.2, and thus far they only have one. That could be a make or break issue.
I am very pessimistic about that. I do not understand how this pc with this old processor and 256 MB Ram is ok to run openSUSE. Sorry but this Pc is really but really old and I am not sure that you have good solution and good performance. I read that you have Pentium 2 . Right???
The 11.4 install was a clean install, formatting /, /boot, /usr partitions. I installed the KDE desktop, along NonOSS packages.
I can imagine that there are reasons to have a seperate */boot *partition (but the reason in your case might be interesting, it is not done normaly), but I am realy curious about the seperate partition for /usr.
There are still some Linux distros that cater to i[45]86. One is AntiX. I imagine that one day all the [45]86s will be dead and they can retire that variant.
