Tuesday 17 July 2007

Prototyping a lightweight linux box


At home, wrapped up in a plastic bag I have an old P2 400MHz machine with 64MB RAM that we used until recently as an alternate dial up machine. Has Windows 98, and somewhere I have a spare no name ethernet card that will work with it. I've also had a hankering for a linux machine at home, but even now linux is a little bloated and a lot of distros don't run comfortably in so little memory.

However in theory you could build ubuntu to run in that little memory with an alternate window manager. Well, I didn't build it on the old clunker, but using parallels I built a custom low memory vm using the alternate install cd for ubuntu 7.04 (feisty fawn) to build a command line only system (there's an ubuntu guide that walks you through this).

To this I added:
  • window managers
    • icewm - preferred
    • fluxbox
  • editors
    • gedit
    • Kwrite (my favorite) & Kate
  • applications
    • abiword
    • firefox
    • icepodder
  • doobries
    • xfe - file manger
    • dillo - lightweight browser

    Notice - no mail client. Theory is that firefox, while a bit slow will perform well enough to work with gmail and by keeping things light the system should perform well enough. If mail is really dire there's always mutt. As a test system it seems to hang together nicely. I can edit (this is being written with kwrite on the vm), print, wordprocess, and surf the web, not to mention download podcasts, which is all I want to build the system for.

    In emulation it seems fine. Next question is how well does it perform on genuine 1999 hardware?


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