[Tfug] Machine Rehabilitation

[Glen Pfeiffer]

On 06/11/2007 12:08 PM, hharden71 at netzero.net wrote:
> I want to try and breathe new life into a machine I have been
> given. An old IBM Aptiva
>   450 Mhz AMD
>   128 Megs ram
[snip]
> Now for my quandry.
> I will probably have to modify the heck out of somebody's
> distro.

I do not think you will need to do that. I run Debian 4.0 (Etch),
which is the latest stable version, on a similar machine. It is a
PIII 500 Mhz with 384 MB ram. The only reason I gave it that much
ram is so my wife and daughter can both have active Gnome
sessions. Otherwise, it would be fine with only 256 MB. If you
can upgrade the ram, that would be best. If not, then you can
still run vanilla Debian, but you might need to use a Window
Manager (WM) instead of a Desktop Environment (DE).


> I am looking to use something lighter for this machine. Perhaps
> Fluxbox, or Xfce4 as primary and ICWM for backup. Pros/Cons for
> each potential primary when compared to the other.

If your daughter is not very technical I would try one of the
DE's first. It will enable her to customize her desktop without
editing configuration files like most WM's require. You will be
able to run Gnome or XFCE4 on 256 MB; not sure about 128 MB.

Fluxbox is my personal favorite for low resource usage with the
most *out of the box* functionality with a nice appearance. If
you use Fluxbox as the primary WM, I see no reason to have a
backup.

IceWM is very light, but I do not like it because it is very
limiting. Then again, you did say "as a backup".

-- 
Glen