LXDE

English Open Chat
#1

Hey guys, new to the forum and linux. Just discovered it last week after my comp was going down hill. I’ve been experimenting with different distros and wanted to try opensuse lxde. My question is that

a) what are the requirements? I know ppl have posted it running on 128 but are there offical requirements? even though my computer has 512mb ram I perfer a distro that runs on 128. It worked great with lubuntu but I’m worried about going over as this computer has had some problems.

b) far as iso’s go I’m confused as to which one to download the i686 or x86-64?

my computer is a cicero amd athlon 64 with 512mb ram 1.5ghz processor and 165gb hard drive. Its about 6 years old. I’m guessing I need the x86-64 iso?

#2

The official openSUSE system requirements are 256MiB minimum RAM with 512 recommended.

Granted, those are with GNOME/KDE in mind.

While openSUSE LXDE might run fine on 128 MiB (I haven’t used oS LXDE so I cannot confirm this), if you are installing from the DVD it will use the same installer as GNOME or KDE. Thus, even though a running LXDE system may need less RAM, the installer will still need that 256/512MiB to function well.

As for i686 v. x86-64…Your Athlon 64 processor supports both. However, there are certain optimisations that are made available throughout x86-64 binaries that are often missing in i686 binaries (because all x86-64 chips support them).

For everyday work, you probably won’t notice a difference, but if you do math intensive calculations (say encoding an .ogg file after ripping a CD, or generating an encryption key) then x86-64 will be faster.

#3

thanks I’ll give it a try. There’s a quiz on which linux is best for you and opensuse is always recommended for me so I guess I’ll give it a go and see.

#4

When I was testing LXDE, after installing it on a PC with 1GB of RAM, I then went and progressively reduced the RAM until finally as a test I booted to an already installed LXDE with 84MB of RAM. It was incredibly slow (and I truly mean incredibly slow) with so little RAM. Audio did not work. I did NOT try firefox ! … But it did boot !

When I restored the setup to 128 MB of RAM, I had audio back, and I could run firefox , although firefox was incredibly slow, because firefox itself requires more than 128 MB of RAM to run. In that case (of Firefox) one is heavily into swap making up for the lack of RAM.

Note, on a PC with 512MB of RAM, there is a risk that the graphic installer may not work. On a PC with only 256MB of RAM, the risk of the graphic installer not working is greater. And a PC with only 128MB of RAM, it is very very very likely the graphic installer will not work. In such a case, one should do a text install, and I made a short how to on doing that using the LXDE liveCD from here: Text mode install from liveCD

One can find the liveCDs for LXDE here: LiveCDs for openSUSE-11.3 LXDE

And the introductory video I made is here: LXDE Introductory video (with background music)

The background audio irritates some, so here is the same video without the background audio: LXDE Introductory video (with no background music)

LXDE should run nicely on your cicero amd athlon 64 with 512mb ram (1.5ghz processor and 165gb hard drive). I do not know the differences between athlon processor nominclature well enough to say whether it is 32-bit or 64-bit.

#5

I have seen the assertion (but not done any testing, so can’t say whether the assertion is correct) that some of the memory structures in 64 bit are less memory efficient in 64 bit than in 32. This seems plausible and suggests that for low memory situations you should always use 32 bit rather than 64.

Comments from anyone having done any actual testing?