I have an Acer TravelMate 2410 which I have been using with openSUSE for many years - mainly for elementary office work, reading docs, playing movies.
But with the recent versions of openSUSE it seems the hardware can’t handle well enough the bigger requirements of the software. This small machine has 1.5GHz Celeron, 512Mb RAM and a 40GB HDD. I installed Tumbleweed as advised by a friend but even opening a web browser seems a travail, although I am using XFCE (and not the heavier KDE). Basically running 2 desktop programs at the same time (e.g. a browser and something else) eats all memory and overall the system is quite slow.
I was told to move from ext4 to ext3 as it would require less CPU but I am not sure how good this is.
I am not willing to throw away this PC as it still works fine for certain things. I just wonder - what would you recommend to make this small laptop work better, i.e. make the system more lightweight? Maybe certain things can be disabled?
On 2015-07-18 12:36, heyjoe wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I have an Acer TravelMate 2410 which I have been using with openSUSE for
> many years - mainly for elementary office work, reading docs, playing
> movies.
>
> But with the recent versions of openSUSE it seems the hardware can’t
> handle well enough the bigger requirements of the software. This small
> machine has 1.5GHz Celeron, 512Mb RAM and a 40GB HDD. I installed
> Tumbleweed as advised by a friend but even opening a web browser seems a
> travail, although I am using XFCE (and not the heavier KDE). Basically
> running 2 desktop programs at the same time (e.g. a browser and
> something else) eats all memory and overall the system is quite slow.
Try midori for web browsing. Firefox is huge, you don’t have the ram for
it. XFCE is acceptable.
> I was told to move from ext4 to ext3 as it would require less CPU but I
> am not sure how good this is.
No, I don’t think so.
> I am not willing to throw away this PC as it still works fine for
> certain things. I just wonder - what would you recommend to make this
> small laptop work better, i.e. make the system more lightweight? Maybe
> certain things can be disabled?
I use a similar laptop as server, not as desktop machine. Sometimes I
have to use Firefox, and it is terribly slow. The machine simply can not
be used for that.
The RAM is just too small now for today’s desktop system running concurrent applications. Increasing RAM would be the best change IMO. If it’s either physically not possible or financially not viable, then all you can do is change software which can eat up a lot of time and maintenance.
IMHO you should not be running Tumbleweed unless you have a deeper understanding of how things work. Tumbleweed is cutting edge so can and does present problems from time to time.
Also for such a a light weight machine I’d look at a much lighter distro like Puppy or D.A.M.N. Small Linux.
As to removing services, yes but you have to decide what you can live without and in general it will not be a huge saving in memory usage.
some ideas from me, as I use(d) a rather old celeron but with more ram (2GiB) and an nvidia geforce5200.
you probobly won’t find drivers for your graphic card (if it is an nvidia 5.x downgrade to 13.1 it’s the last that supported that chip)
don’t use gnome3.x or kde4, if you want a big desktop environment you can still get kde3 for 13.1 and 13.2 from http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/KDE3/
if you want a newer de you can try lxde with openbox, or lxqt with openbox, or razorqt (razorqt merged with lxde to form lxqt).
Firefox will still work, it’s the more media rich content that needs more ram, install the flashblock and noscript addons for a lighter web experience.
disable all composition as with an old graphic card all composition will be done by the cpu.
If you can find more ram definitely upgrade.
On 2015-07-18 13:56, heyjoe wrote:
>
> Thanks!
>
> midori looks promising. I will also check if I can find/add RAM.
If that is not possible, an alternative is a faster hard disk (for
swap), meaning an SSD. Many will cringe at this idea, as flash
technology has a limited (but very high) number of writes, but… If
your disk is not SATA, but PATA, then I think you will not find any.
O a desktop machine, I would suggest having several hard disks instead
of one, and distributing the load.
> Anything else? Maybe some heavy services enabled by default can be
> disabled?
midori uses webkit in my personal experience you’re better off with a gecko based browser as newer gecko is quite fast in rendering javascript or go with chromium.
If everything else fails you can use openbox without a desktop environment it’s light as a feather, or use the minimalist WindowMaker as your work environment.
personally I love lxqt but razorqt seams a bit more polished, razor uses Qt4, lxqt uses Qt5 and none of them have any kde4(5) dependencies but as they don’t have a window manager you need to use openbox as it’s much lighter then kwin, on the plus side razor’s repository has a few lightweight Qt4 apps that don’t have kde4 dependencies their pdf viewer qpdfview is my favorite much faster then Okular or Evinvce https://software.opensuse.org/package/qpdfview
I agree that the real problem is the RAM; I had a 2004 Acer Travelmate and I ran it satisfactorily with 768MB of RAM plus 1.5GB swap. (When I bought it, it had 256MB RAM.) I didn’t have any problem running KDE4 on this machine because it is not a memory hog like KDE3 and it automatically shuts down memory hogging effects on a machine with less RAM.
The Spanish developers of Minino reckon that 1GB is the least you need, not because of the speed of the browser but because of what website designers throw at you. They bundle Midori with their minimalist distro which I run on a machine with 256MB.
the biggest “problem” with the web today is not the browser but the content, a lot of javascript, flash and ads.
I was browsing the content of QtDesktop repo and found this light little browser https://software.opensuse.org/package/qupzilla
it’s a nice alternative to Firefox, it’s Qt4 without any kde dependencies like konqy, it comes with a build-in adblocker and flash-blocker, tested it on youtube and vimeo played a few video’s via flash. On most sites it’s extremely fast.
I would still stick with Firefox as a main browser tho.
On 2015-07-18 23:06, I A wrote:
>
> the biggest “problem” with the web today is not the browser but the
> content, a lot of javascript, flash and ads.
Yes.
> I was browsing the content of QtDesktop repo and found this light little
> browser
> https://software.opensuse.org/package/qupzilla
> it’s a nice alternative to Firefox, it’s Qt4 without any kde
> dependencies like konqy, it comes with a build-in adblocker and
Interesting.
> flash-blocker, tested it on youtube and vimeo played a few video’s via
> flash. On most sites it’s extremely fast.
> I would still stick with Firefox as a main browser tho.
Notice that using an addon like “ABD” (add block plus) makes Firefox use
more ram. Depending on the page, a lot more ram. Same goes for Chrome.
There was a very interesting thread where a Chrome developer explained
why, I might be able to dig out the link if there is interest.
I can’t believe I didn’t notice it before, but according to those graphs (assuming they used the same web pages for their tests) gecko needs less then 50% of the RAM webkit (or blink) uses.
Firefox is less of a memory hog then Chrome.
On 2015-07-19 03:26, I A wrote:
>
>> Notice that using an addon like “ABD” (add block plus) makes Firefox use
>> more ram. Depending on the page, a lot more ram. Same goes for Chrome.
> I think we had this discussion before, that’s true about abp, but
> according to the ublock devs not true for ublock
Thanks everyone for the feedback and advises. Sorry for the late reply, I was away from the city (and Internet) for some time.
Hardware upgrade is highly unlikely as it is a pretty old machine which I am not planning to invest in.
BTW something I found: Playing full-hd videos in smplayer results in smooth playing but often times the video is a second or two behind the sound. Playing the same files in the “videos” application plays them smoothly. Just sharing.
> BTW something I found: Playing full-hd videos in smplayer results in
> smooth playing but often times the video is a second or two behind the
> sound. Playing the same files in the “videos” application plays them
> smoothly. Just sharing.
Yes, it can happen. There are a few applications or libraries to play
video: there is xine, mplayer, and vlc. Then there is gstreamer, but I’m
not sure what application uses it.
With a resource limited machine, it may be worth it to compile yourself
some applications, and tune for the exact CPU you have.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)
afaik btrfs is great for production systems for older home use machines with limited storage not so much, as it makes regular snapshots of the file system you might find yourself running out of space.
I actually have this enabled but regardless of it HD video stays behind. If I forward 10 seconds and go back immediately everything is back in sync for some time and some minutes later again out of sync.
>
> BTW doesn’t smplayer use mplayer? I thought it was just a frontend for
> it.
Yes.
> Is there any point of switching from ext4 (for / and /home right now) to
> btrfs/xfs?
I would not use btrfs with a small/slow disk.
ext4 is perfect.
XFS also works well on my small/old machines. It is a bit more expensive
in RAM, I think, but it is very good for large files, such as videos,
which is often the reason I use it. And has some special tools for
backups and maintenance.
There is some advantage when using a single filesystem type: you do not
need to load the modules for them.
Reiserfs is still supported, and it is very efficient. I would not use
it for “/”, though. Not today.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)
