Christopher M. Jones wrote:
> I have recently been trying to put Linux on some old machines, most
> notably two old Laptops. I only know the specs on one: Dell Inspiron
> 3000 with 3G HD and 64M, Pentium MMX 266. When I tried to put Debian
> Sarge on there it was slow slow slow. More specifically: Booting off the
> CD was fine, installing the base system was fine, but booting off the hd
> was not. The kernel took forever to come up and installing software took
> nearly two days to not even fully complete. Now I'm trying to put Gentoo
> on the same machine. For those of you familiar with a Gentoo install,
> everything was fine until I chrooted into my new filesystem. Env-update
> took about a minute to complete. Now it's been busy unpacking the kernel
> source for about thirteen hours now.
>
> I also tried to do this on an old Compaq, I assume with similar to worse
> hardware. Same thing.
>
> By contrast, my ancient old Slackware 7.0 has no trouble at all. What's
> the deal? What can I do to speed things up?
I think adding more ram, if at all possible, would give you a very
noticeable speed-up. Also, look into hdparm, to see if you can issue
some options to speed up your hard drive, and it sounds like you are
already going to compile your own kernel, leaving out stuff you won't
use. And, I would go with either Debian or Slackware in this case; I
wouldn't want to wait for that system to compile everything.
Kevin
___________________
Nolug mailing list
nolug@nolug.org
Received on 10/17/04
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : 12/19/08 EST