Low memory desktops

I am wondering what Desktop I should be using that doesn't consume alot of ram and works well with slow video cards.

I have a little iBook G3 Clamshell with about 300 meg of ram in it. IT has an ATI Rage I think, which really is slow in Gnome. I am looking for something, anythnig, that will speed this little bugger up. I will even change from Ubuntu if need be.

fluxbox, windowmaker, blackbox, are a few

Any distros that come with those already installed? Compiling on this lappy is...far from fun. And I don't know TOO much about installing them.

Debian has all of them and runs very well on ibooks.

shveet... I hope it owrks well with my old one. Its a 300 mhz. Not exactly a powerhouse... but good idea! I will give Debian a shot. Thanks for your help guys, and if anyone else has suggestions, let me know. I am desperate

I use fluxbox or icewm on my P133 laptop and they are quite speedy.

MRD said:

I use fluxbox or icewm on my P133 laptop and they are quite speedy.

Click to expand...

What about the video card though? I mean i think the main issue is that it is a 4 meg ATI card. Is it possible ot get it decently fast? Not lagtastic?

Easily. 2D graphics without transparencies are no match for any videocard.

Well with any ATI video card, even after installing drivers sucessfully have been laggy. I've even used thme on decent puters.

My P133 has 1mb integrated trident graphics from ~1996. Not exactly a 7800 SLI system.

~$ lspci
0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. 430MX - 82437MX Mob. System Ctrlr (MTSC) & 82438MX Data Path (MTDP) (rev 02)
0000:00:01.0 Bridge: Intel Corp. 430MX - 82371MX Mobile PCI I/O IDE Xcelerator (MPIIX) (rev 03)
0000:00:03.0 VGA compatible controller: Trident Microsystems TGUI 9660/938x/968x (rev d3)
0000:00:13.0 PCMCIA bridge: Cirrus Logic CL 6729 (rev e2)

You should attempt to use the driver provided in the kernel if you can. For older hardware, (and when you don't care for 3D) those will work best. I had a Pentium 2 366MHz laptop for a long time and I used Fluxbox and the kernel driver for the Trident CyberBlade 9388 video.

I liked flux so much, I switched over my 2.66 GHz/1 GB/Quadro4900XGL workstation over to it, and that machine can definitely run something more memory intensive....

@MRD: Man, thats wicked you could use a trident for decent performance!

@SickBoy: Yeah I loved flux when I started out with it. My friend introduced it to me and man is it ever powerful.

Anyway, I wanted to update a little. I installed debian and it asked for the driver of course. I chose ATI and it performs better than any other OS that has ever been on this machine. It really did make a difference. I suppose there was no driver on ubuntu for this ol ATI.

Anyway, thanks again all of you. I will keep trying to get it working nice, but what hinders me is the built in 3.3 gig drive. I can't get it out unless i tear this entire thing apart.

I notice that on a complex webpage, my p133 takes some time to figure out how to decode all the html. It was fast for web browsing in its day, but web pages were much simpler then. Certainly I can't game with it, and it isn't able to handle full screen video. Basically, I can do web browsing or word processing with it, or use it as a terminal to another pc.

If you use linux, you can ssh into your other boxes and use the display on the laptop, which makes the other cpu do all the work and outputs the graphics to the laptop. I do that a lot because the laptop is so old and slow.

I really like icewm, it's very light on memory and cpu time.

Gnufsh said:

I really like icewm, it's very light on memory and cpu time.

Click to expand...

Yeah I used it once, but with onoly 1 mouse button, it gets tricky as I remember it.

@MRD: Don't use linux on manyt other PCs and often don't instlal sshd unless I want to configure a few things on the lappy. I will mostly use it for surfing the next, though unfortunately it seems I cannot install Java or Flash since I am not i586

Cheator said:

Yeah I used it once, but with onoly 1 mouse button, it gets tricky as I remember it.

Click to expand...

How so?

@MRD: Don't use linux on manyt other PCs and often don't instlal sshd unless I want to configure a few things on the lappy. I will mostly use it for surfing the next, though unfortunately it seems I cannot install Java or Flash since I am not i586

Click to expand...

IBM's jdk 1.4.2.03 is available for PPC as is blackdown 1.3.1-14-FCS.

IMHO, 2d ati opensource drivers are very good.

edit: Usually, laptop HDDs aren't that hard to get to. You can probably find instructions online.

Gnufsh said:

How so?


IBM's jdk 1.4.2.03 is available for PPC as is blackdown 1.3.1-14-FCS.

IMHO, 2d ati opensource drivers are very good.

edit: Usually, laptop HDDs aren't that hard to get to. You can probably find instructions online.

Click to expand...

It gets tricky as I am very used to using that desktop with 3 mouse buttons and a scroll wheel

Aye I figured I could get my hands on Javaq for PPC, but I really don't have THAT much expertiese, so I just don't feel like starting something that will take me an hour to do.

Yeah, ATi drivers are pretty nice. I installed ubuntu again too as I found the issue with my card. IT turns out that the driver that comes with it doesn't work well with 24 bit depth. 16 bit depth cleared it right up.

I have a 20 gig lappy hard drive and certainly have the means of getting another one. But pulling this thing apart to get at the hard drive is... complicated to say the least. Its about a 60 step process which I don't want to follow (see the guide here). I would love to have more room on it, but to take my mac apart and possibly break crap isn't worth it. I can just use my P2 333 that is lieing around as a linux notebook if I need it.


But I really don't NEEd more space anyhow. 3.3 gigs allows a distro and thats decent enough. I would have other distros on there too but there is no room, and I am not familiar with yaboot (nor do I want to be).

I actually haven't even filled my 2.1 gb hard drive. It has room for my distro, X, word processing apps, browsers, and the few other things that the laptop is actually fast enough to run. I can access the file server if I need more space, but I haven't used it yet.

One thing to be careful about if you do decide to upgrade the laptop's hd is that a lot of the older laptops do not support large hard drives. I know people with my thinkpad tried to put in 10gb drives and it wouldn't recognize them. I think the limit was around 6 gb.

This one is fairly modern and won't run into TOO many issues. However, as mentioned before, I will never upgrade mine unless a skilled someone does it for me.