On Mon 07 Feb 2022 at 18:08:41 (-0500), Chuck Zmudzinski wrote: > On 2/7/2022 4:36 PM, Greg Wooledge wrote: > > On Mon, Feb 07, 2022 at 04:31:51PM -0500, Chuck Zmudzinski wrote: > > > On 2/7/2022 10:50 AM, William Lee Valentine wrote: > > > > I am wondering whether a current Debian distribution can be installed > > > > and run on an older Pentium III computer. (I have Debian 11.2 on a DVD.) > > > > > > > > The computer is > > > > > > > > Dell Dimension XPS T500: Intel Pentium III processor (Katnai) > > > > memory: 756 megabytes, running at 500 megahertz > > > > IDE disc drive: 60 gigabytes > > > > Debian partition: currently 42 gigabytes > > > > Debian 6.0: Squeeze > > > Based on what others are saying, it looks like a typical modern Debian > > > desktop environment such as Gnome or Plasma KDE will not work well with > > > such > > > an old system. I suggest you look for a Distro that is tailored for old > > > hardware. > > Bah, silly. Just use a traditional window manager instead of a bloated > > Desktop Environment. Problem solved. > > Which windows manager for an extremely resource-limited system?
I had no difficulty running buster's fvwm on a Pentium III Coppermine from 2000, until the PSU expired. 650MHz, and 512MB memory. Your memory is probably more use that my speed. But 60GB might limit its usefulness: my minitower would hold four PATA drives, and I have three 500GB still left, and had a 200GB until it expired. You have to have a reason to keep running it, of course. Mine was that drive capacity, plus nostalgia: it was the desktop machine I retained when I retired. This run of "top" is from a modern system after a while reading my email. To trigger fvwm into top place, I switched between several of the open viewports. (Mutt is obviously sleeping.) PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 2730 auser 20 0 373960 67100 36148 S 5.6 0.8 0:03.20 Xorg 2782 auser 20 0 84244 13084 11144 S 0.7 0.2 0:00.25 fvwm 2790 auser 20 0 81296 12360 10704 S 0.7 0.2 0:00.16 FvwmPager 10 root 20 0 0 0 0 I 0.3 0.0 0:00.15 rcu_sched 614 nobody 20 0 5080 2820 2580 S 0.3 0.0 0:00.06 thd 1 root 20 0 22276 10304 7748 S 0.0 0.1 0:01.01 systemd > Debian's wiki page on window managers lists more than 30 > possibilities. Its not silly to take a look at a distro based on > Debian that is tailored for low resources as a starting point to try > and build a Debian 11.2 system that will work OK on a Pentium III with > less than 1 GB of memory. Debian provides so many packages, and such > distros like antiX can give one an idea about which packages to use > when trying to build a Debian 11.2 system that will work well on an > older system with such a small amount of memory and such an old CPU. I install all the software that I do on any other machine, I just don't run it if the machine's not up to it. (It had the disk space not to worry, of course.) So I wouldn't open libreoffice or firefox, for example. Speed wasn't an issue (/home was encrypted), just memory, even with 1GB swap (encrypted). > > But the *real* problem will come when they try to run a web browser. That's > > where the truly massive memory demand is. > > > > 756 MB is plenty of RAM for daily use of everything except a web browser. > > > > Yes, it will be important to try to find a web browser that is the > least bloated as possible. Again, looking at the browser choices of > distros tailored for old hardware can help build a Debian 11.2 system > that will work well on old hardware. So that I could read email, I used lynx (with -localhost) for HTML. Mind you, I do that on all my current machines too. > In any case, it will need to be a carefully crafted selection of > Debian 11.2 packages to have a decent experience, and most definitely > start with a small netinst installation with only the text console to > start, and then build the GUI environment carefully from the ground > up. > > Again, good luck to the OP in trying out Debian 11.2 on his system. One exception: I do run firefox on a 1.5GHz 500MB laptop, which is painful. When I installed bullseye, it took 3 minutes for FF to display the (empty) startup page. But it's useful to have a system with zero monetary worth that I could trash or lose without worrying about it. Cheers, David.