500mhz pentium III with 512mb ram enough for Mint 10 LXDE

[castletonia]

I just inherited a Compaq Presario 3555 that currently has windows 98 installed. It has a 500mhz pentium III and I upgraded the memory from 64mb to 512mb. I know the ram meets the requirements for lxde but is the processor enough? Or should I be looking into something small like Puppy linux. All I plan to use this for is email and web browsing as I don't think it could really handle any more?

[wayne128]

I just inherited a Compaq Presario 3555 that currently has windows 98 installed. It has a 500mhz pentium III and I upgraded the memory from 64mb to 512mb. I know the ram meets the requirements for lxde but is the processor enough? Or should I be looking into something small like Puppy linux. All I plan to use this for is email and web browsing as I don't think it could really handle any more?

You have 512M, it is good enough
your CPU 500M is slow.
I think you should try antiX which is well know for old computer, in addition to Puppy.
Salix is also quite suitable for old computer.

Another thing for you, as you only want web browsing and email, you could just get a partedmagic ( which is Linux based on Slackware for recovery works, but it has lots of things such as a web browser, etc)
This would run totally in RAM, like Puppy, thus they will give you 'quite high speed' because they run in RAM.

[edwardr]

I've been impressed with how well Puppy ran on my 650 Mhz, 512 MB machine a couple of years ago, but I never really liked the look of the windows, it just seemed a bit clunky (to be fair, I have not tried the newer releases). I really like the look and feel of Mint. You might give LXDE a try and turn off all the autostart items you don't absolutely need. I have it on a test partition on my current laptop and it runs using 80 MB RAM when idling at startup. I edited the autostart file and commented out Bluetooth, Mint update, something else that I forget now, even the desktop (i use feh to put a pretty picture on the desktop at startup).

[castletonia]

Thanks for the tips. I am going to try Puppy tomorrow and I also downloaded Slitaz and Salix lxde. I hope I can get mint to work as I am most familiar and comfortable with it. I haven't really looked yet but are there any tutorials stating what I can disable and what must be kept running for mint?

[edwardr]

Here's the main part of my autostart file, found at /etc/xdg/lxsession/Mint/autostart

@/usr/lib/policykit-1-gnome/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1
@setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp
@lxpanel --profile Mint
@xscreensaver -no-splash
@nm-applet
#@pcmanfm --desktop
#@bluetooth-applet
#@sh -c 'test -e /var/cache/jockey/check || exec jockey-gtk --check'
@gnome-power-manager
#@system-config-printer-applet
#@mintupdate-launcher
#@/usr/lib/linuxmint/mintUpload/launch-file-uploader.py

I commented out the following:

pcmanfm controlling my desktop (it means I can't have shortcuts on my desktop, but I don't mind)
bluetooth (an old computer like that probably doesn't have bluetooth)
jockey (this checks for restricted drivers for hardware, it will run when you first install Mint, and you shouldn't need it again unless you install new hardware, if so, just run it from the menu, I think it's called Hardware Drivers)
printer applet (I don't plan on printing from my LXDE install)
Mint update (I'll just have to remember to check manually for updates every so often)
Mint upload (I don't need to upload files to the internet)

[mastablasta]

You could try fluxbox desktop.

Also Crunchbang can be an option.

throwing out the stuff might not help as your issue is not RAM but CPU. Those things owuld reside in ram and shouldn't take CPU power unless you call them into use.

Also depends on porgrammes you will use. You would need to look at how much CPU their requirements are. With light programmes you could pull it off. Man i wish i could upgrade mine to 512MB ram. I am stuck at 256 of which 32 is for graphics card.

[edwardr]

I just checked out a review of Puppy 5, it looks a lot more polished and visually appealing than the version I had used before.

[abercrombieande]

I have puppy wary on a Pentium II, its fast and small. You can run it off the cd if you want to try it first. If you go to install it on the local hard drive make sure you read the install instructions

[castletonia]

So I tried Puppy which is fast. Peppermint Ice and Mint 10 LXDE take awhile to start up but run pretty well. Since I am more familiar with Mint, I think I am going to go that route. Now my problem is connecting to the internet. There is no ethernet hookup so I took the ethernet card out of my other computer and put it in this one. My problem is that the driver is not installed and it will not work. My other computer which is also running mint, did not need a driver it worked fine.

[mastablasta]

which Mint you installed? which card you "installed"? is it same card that works in another computer?

lspci in terminal to get the info and to see if it is detected.

could it be a faulty PCI port?

also i see latest Mint XFCE has nice RAM usage. not sure how it would handle your processor.

[castletonia]

i tried all 3 pci ports and had the same result. The green light would come on indicating what I believe is that it is working but the light for the ethernet 10/100 was not on. Under windows 98 it showed the drivers were missing which is why I am still using that is the problem. I currently have Bodhi Linux on there but after playing around for a bit do not really like it so I plan on installing Mint 10 LXDE on the computer tomorrow or Friday. I have ordered a different ethernet card and a wireless usb adapter that are supposed to both be linux compatible.

The card did work on a different computer that is currently running Mint 10 LXDE. Kinda confused. I hope the pci ports are not bad but I have no idea of how to test them.

[/Zoran\]

you should also try slitaz, i've skimmed through the posts here and i don't think anyone mentioned it...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EYC2eBqKXs