Chris Mauritz chrism@imntv.com wrote:
kenkensmile@netscape.net wrote:
I am using centOS for my server and centOS is extremely stable. I almost love centOS more than my wife. However, centOS is a bit heavy to run on my notebook (P III 1G, 256MB RAM). I need gnome, firefox, openoffice, realplayer, gaim, acrobat and thunderbird on my notebook, but if I install all of them (plus base-system), my notebook becomes very slow. I wish I could have a lighter version of centOS for notebooks and old desktops. Is there any project that I could have a mini-centOS in the future???
The slowness isn't really CentOS's fault. That's not really enough memory for an X+gnome environment if you're going to be running piggy applications like openoffice. Also, I suspect an older P3 notebook probably has rather slow video hardware which may make things seem worse than they really are. The best thing you can do to speed things up is to bump your memory up to 512mb. I suspect that will make a big difference in perceived speed.
Cheers,
C
Thanks for the reply.
Yes, you are exactly right. My notebook has a slow video hardware(8MB). Unfortunately, I cannot upgrade memory up to 512MB, because 256MB is the maximum capacity. I have also found an article that MS is making a new OS for old computers, so I just simply thought I would like to have a mini-centOS.
http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-5705456.html
Cheers,
Joe
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kenkensmile@netscape.net wrote:
Thanks for the reply.
Yes, you are exactly right. My notebook has a slow video hardware(8MB). Unfortunately, I cannot upgrade memory up to 512MB, because 256MB is the maximum capacity. I have also found an article that MS is making a new OS for old computers, so I just simply thought I would like to have a mini-centOS.
Well, then the best you can do (as others have suggested) is to trim some of the bloated components you're running. Openoffice is a PIG in terms of resources consumed. So is gnome. If you can reduce the memory footprint of some of your apps, you should be fine. The kernel itself and most of the "required" system tools actually have a rather small footprint.
Cheers,
C
Chris Mauritz said:
kenkensmile@netscape.net wrote:
Thanks for the reply.
Yes, you are exactly right. My notebook has a slow video hardware(8MB). Unfortunately, I cannot upgrade memory up to 512MB, because 256MB is the maximum capacity. I have also found an article that MS is making a new OS for old computers, so I just simply thought I would like to have a mini-centOS.
If it helps any, I'm running CentOS4 on an old PII 400Mhz, 192MB laptop. Under Gnome, it's not exactly snappy, but it is usable. Unser XFCE4.2, i'm quite ahppy with it. I know you stated that you need Gnome, and I also prefer it. But if you haven't tried some of the lightweight alternatives, give them a shot, you may be surprised.
Intereating article about the new lightweight Windows OS. However, I don't think it will meet your needs, as it will be extremely crippled, to the point it won't even run MS Office if I read correctly. Doug
On Fri, 2005-05-13 at 07:47 -0400, kenkensmile@netscape.net wrote:
Chris Mauritz chrism@imntv.com wrote:
kenkensmile@netscape.net wrote:
I am using centOS for my server and centOS is extremely stable. I almost love centOS more than my wife. However, centOS is a bit heavy to run on my notebook (P III 1G, 256MB RAM). I need gnome, firefox, openoffice, realplayer, gaim, acrobat and thunderbird on my notebook, but if I install all of them (plus base-system), my notebook becomes very slow. I wish I could have a lighter version of centOS for notebooks and old desktops. Is there any project that I could have a mini-centOS in the future???
The slowness isn't really CentOS's fault. That's not really enough memory for an X+gnome environment if you're going to be running piggy applications like openoffice. Also, I suspect an older P3 notebook probably has rather slow video hardware which may make things seem worse than they really are. The best thing you can do to speed things up is to bump your memory up to 512mb. I suspect that will make a big difference in perceived speed.
Cheers,
C
Thanks for the reply.
Yes, you are exactly right. My notebook has a slow video hardware(8MB). Unfortunately, I cannot upgrade memory up to 512MB, because 256MB is the maximum capacity. I have also found an article that MS is making a new OS for old computers, so I just simply thought I would like to have a mini-centOS.
But ... CentOS is by it's nature a rebuild of sources for RHEL (3 or 4) ... so you can choose to install or not install parts of it.
The install I told you ... minimal + only XFCE, X-windows, openoffice, HelixPlayer, firefox, thunderbird, gaim (i didn't do acrobat) is:
Minimal install : 656 MB .....
after running the commands:
rpm --import /usr/share/doc/centos-release-4/RPM-GPG-KEY-centos4
yum groupinstall "X Window System" XFCE-4.2
yum install gaim thunderbird firefox openoffice*
vi /etc/inittab ( then set id:3:initdefault: to id:5:initdefault: to boot in GUI mode)
switchdesk XFCE
reboot ------------------------------------------------------ I took me 24 Minutes to do that install on a pIII 800 desktop machine with 640 mb of RAM.
Final Size: 2.1 GB
Total time for the install: 25 Minutes
------------------- After reboot, I left only these services running:
[root@test ~]# chkconfig --list | grep 5:on xinetd 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off readahead_early 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:off 4:off 5:on 6:off sendmail 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off network 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off messagebus 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off atd 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off kudzu 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off mdmonitor 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off cpuspeed 0:off 1:on 2:on 3:on 4:off 5:on 6:off smartd 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off acpid 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off autofs 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off sshd 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off apmd 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off haldaemon 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off cups-config-daemon 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off crond 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off readahead 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:off 4:off 5:on 6:off iptables 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off anacron 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off xfs 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off cups 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off syslog 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off
(you could turn off more items ... use system-config-services to turn off unneeded stuff)
reboot again to test size of running programs... ---------------------------------------------- Mem: 645732k total, 168360k used, 477372k free, 10132k buffers Swap: 1310712k total, 0k used, 1310712k free, 104232k cached
So with the desktop running ... 168 MB in use ... and 104 MB is cached info that isn't really in use. ... so 64mb in use
Open openoffice writer: 273656k used, 186752k cached ... so 87mb in use
open firefox (with writer still open): 303304 used, 205312 cached ... so 98mb in use
so ... with XFCE-4.2 you should be OK with 256mb RAM.
I am running this setup with a PII-266 and 192mb RAM .. it is not super speedy, but I can use it :) ----------------------------------------------
On 5/13/05, kenkensmile@netscape.net kenkensmile@netscape.net wrote:
Yes, you are exactly right. My notebook has a slow video hardware(8MB). Unfortunately, I cannot upgrade memory up to 512MB, because 256MB is the maximum capacity. I have also found an article that MS is making a new OS for old computers, so I just simply thought I would like to have a mini-centOS.
If you want to compare CentOS to this, then you have to realize that this "lightweight" version of MS will only run a remote desktop session (Terminal Service), a browser (IE), a music app (MSWindows Media Player), a virus scanner and a file navigation utility (Explorer).
As others have pointed out, you can easily setup a minimal version of CentOS which can do these things:
Select "minimal" during the install Add in rdesktop, xfce, firefox, clamav if you really want the virus scan, add xmms or similar and you have an equivalent system which I believe would be much snappier than the WindowsXP/Embedded equivalent.
Regards, Greg
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