[CentOS] Mini-centOS

Johnny Hughes mailing-lists at hughesjr.com
Fri May 13 12:47:27 UTC 2005


On Fri, 2005-05-13 at 07:47 -0400, kenkensmile at netscape.net wrote: 
> Chris Mauritz <chrism at imntv.com> wrote:
> 
> >kenkensmile at 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
> 

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 at 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 :)
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