[ale] Dell Ispirion B130 laptop with 2GBdisk and 2GB memory (max)

[Steve Litt]

On Mon, 1 Feb 2016 18:24:41 -0500
Steve Litt <slitt at troubleshooters.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 1 Feb 2016 15:34:32 -0500
> Boris Borisov <bugyatl at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > He may meant 20GB. Puppy Linux is starting to get fat as well. No
> > offense here implied. The only advantage us running from USB drive
> > or memory disk and very comprehensive drivers and firmware
> > collection. But if you tried latest "quirky" boot up takes forever.
> > 
> > But I guess that is the future OS are getting fat and slow and
> > thankfully hardware manufacturers are able to put 4-8 cores in chip
> > for next to nothing.
> > 
> > Slim distro building around busybox is Slitaz. ISO is 50 MB
> > installed on HDD is around 320. You get desktop file manager
> > browser and web-based control panel.
> > 
> > But only my opinion.  
> 
> Nobody can argue that today's Linux can run on my 1998 Pentium II
> 300mhz with 16*M*B of RAM, like Win98 or 1999 Red Hat 5.1 could do.
> But that sort of misses the point: My Pentium II300 cost me about $2K
> in December 1998.

More news...

Today I used the Void no-GUI live installer CD to install Void on a
Qemu VM with 128MB RAM, 4GB disk, and a single core modern speed CPU (I
didn't know how to slow down the CPU in my qemu-system command).

Then, on the CLI VM, I installed LXDE, xorg, Libreoffice, Chromium and
Midori. I devoted 256MB of swap space on the drive.

Here are the results...

Nobody's going to be watching videos on this thing, or browsing
websites with a lot of graphics. It swaps, and the swapping chokes off
the CPU.

Nobody's going to use Chromium on this machine. Chromium just uses too
much RAM.

However, using Midori, and setting Midori's web page to
http://www.troubleshooters.com, a very fast loading page, it took only
8 seconds between clicking Midori on the LXDE menu and viewing
Troubleshooters.Com's main page. Better yet, once Midori is running,
accessing other mostly, but not completely, text based
Troubleshooters.Com content is less than 1 second latency.

My study show that with this 128MB machine I can easily use LibreOffice
to write simple documents, with no annoying delays or latencies.

I switched the qemu-system command to use 256MB of RAM, and was able to
use Chromium to play videos, at least low rez ones.

SteveT

Steve Litt 
February 2016 featured book: The Key to Everyday Excellence
http://www.troubleshooters.com/key