Will this run Mint XFCE?

[Old Marcus]

Just pieced together an old box for my dad, since the motherboard on his died. Had a look at the specs and would really like to run Mint on it, but not sure how well. so my question is, how well will Mint XFCE run on these specs?

Intel Celeron 1.0GHz Processor
248 Mb RAM
Herules 3D Prophet 4000XT PCI

Will this run Mint XFCE at a decent speed or should I find something more lightweight? I tried the LiveCD and it lagged a little, but I don't know how much better the HDD installation would be.

[belovedmonster]

That should run it just fine. If it is a little too sluggish for your taste I'm sure you could upgrade the RAM very cheaply. 512MB would be more than enough.

[Old Marcus]

Not sure how much further I can upgrade the RAM on this motherboard. I've got to find out what make it is first.
EDIT: Found I can upgrade it to 512mb. It has two RAM slots, could I just put a 512 SDRAM stick in one slot or would I need two 256?

[rivenought]

If the max for your machine is 512, then you can get by with 256 + 256. I have done that same route with plenty of Dell OptiPlex machines with very similar specifications. 512 provides plenty of horsepower for average activities.

As a test, I tried Mint 5 GNOME on a machine with 256 MB RAM and 1.1 GHz Celeron. It ran glacially slow with the Live CD. I put in the Live CD of Mint 5 Xfce, and it ran just fine. While Xfce was in there, I used the partitioner to set up my partitions and a 1 GB swap file. Curious, I then put the GNOME CD back in. It ran much better with a big swap file. For fun, I then installed GNOME on there, and to my surprise, it runs acceptably well for web browsing and email. If I can get a machine with 256 MB RAM to run GNOME, I know Xfce will be a breeze. So, you can most likely get by with just 248 MB for now until you can boost everything up to 512. Have fun.

[Old Marcus]

Thanks for the advice. I've put this comp together for my dad, since the motherboard on his died. He only wants to use it for web browsing and word processing, so this should be good.

[szamot83]

I prefer set vm.swappines to 5 to decrease swap usage. I have set it to 5 and performance on similar laptop has grow up.
If you want to do this just add line vm.swappiness=5 to /etc/sysctl.conf
Next thing I do is setting noatime flag instead relatime flag to every mounted device.
Another thing is disabling gnome-power-manager, mintupdate (I'm using update manager when I want to update my system)) and check for new hardware drivers from Autostarted applications.
Disabling some services (like bluetooth) also make better performance.

That's all I do on my daughter's laptop.

Regards.

[exploder]

szamot83 , nice to see another "tweaker" in the forun!

[EchoLynx]

I always wondered why there was some HDD activity each time I used a LiveCD- now I know for sure.

Thank you.

[szamot83]

Thank you Exploder, it is nice to hear this, especially from you.

EchoLynx , "noatime" flag gives second live to my laptops battery. I could work about 15 minutes longer than it was on "relatime" flag.

I have checked LXDE with XFCE Mint version, tomorrow I'll post results.

[bobpur]

I just got Ellysa Xfce running on a Compaq Presario 5001CL with an 800 Mhz AMD Duron cpu, 768 mbs RAM, and an XFX 7600GT XXX video card. The RAM is maxed out at 768 mb. The video card is, probably a bit much for this machine. I think I have one a little more fitting for this machine. It's a Nvidia TNT2 Vanta video card which is what this machine originally had in it.

How does it run? As a matter of fact it runs quite nice. A heck of a lot better than it run WinXP. I hope I can still find a bigger Duron for it. A 1.2 ghz will max this board out.

This machine, also, dualboots along with Win2K. No reason for it; I just had an old machine and nothing to do.