On Tue, 2005-01-18 at 15:45 +1000, Stuart Longland wrote:
Silicon Graphics Indy CPU: MIPS R4600 SC 133MHz A low end machine by SGI standards RAM: 256MB 72-pin ECC That's the maximum for an Indy HDD: 9GB IBM SCSI OS: Gentoo 1.4.16, compiled for MIPS-III
Let me ask a potentially politically incorrect question. How many other distros are there that will even run on this box? Is Gentoo the only Linux hope for a 133 MHz MIPS? How well would a full-blown or even partial KDE run on it?
Actually, assuming one is patient, it runs quite well. However, the RAM makes a big difference here -- yes, KDE is fairly CPU intensive, but it is even more RAM intensive. I have tried KDE 3.0 on an AMD K6-2 300MHz w/ 16MB RAM -- 5 minutes and it never even made it past the splash screen (this was on Slackware 8.0 -- long before I discovered Gentoo).
I have a 133 MHz Pentium MMX, admittedly with only 32 MB of RAM. I just barely got Debian Woody to run in it, and KDE (2.something!) was a stretch. It would come up, but it wasn't very responsive. I ended up going to the Enlightenment desktop on it. Funny thing is, this machine (Libretto 70CT, actually) did a very good job with Windows 95, and I've heard of folks successfully running NT 4.0 on them.
Yeah, it would be largely a lack of RAM that would really be holding things up. Boost that to ~64MB, and KDE will start to become useable. Boost to ~128MB, and it starts to become a useful desktop.
When is it time to take these old things out behind the barn and shoot them?
When the smoke escapes? Newer boxes, it's relatively simple to put the smoke back in the box -- but these old boxes it definately is a break and dump affair. However, as old as this Indy is (1993 vintage, I think the one here is probably late '93 early '94) it's been a fun little toy, and has taught me more about the innards of a computer than any of my 2 or so years at university thus far.
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| Stuart Longland -oOo- http://stuartl.longlandclan.hopto.org |
| Atomic Linux Project -oOo- http://atomicl.berlios.de |
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| I haven't lost my mind - it's backed up on a tape somewhere |
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