What does DSL get run on nowadays?

[News]

News

[Stats]

Stats

[CNK]

We don't get many polls (or, well.. posts) 'round these parts, so I thought I'd finally ask what I've long been wondering about DSL users. What sort of machines are they ruinning the OS on?

----------
Instructions
Select as many options as you have PCs running DSL. If your PC has one of the specific models of CPU in it, then the job's easy, otherwise (eg. an Intel Celeron) you'll have to have an idea of what main models were about at the time it was made. A good source of information on old CPUs that conveys the general and inspecific nature of it all is The Red Hill Hardware Guide (http://www.redhill.net.au/iu.html), but it's a bit of a read.

Feel free to post a reply with more details about your machine/s too.

As a quick attempt to generalise, here are the CPU models compared to the sorts of speeds you might expect (completely inaccurate as I haven't the time to look it all up, but gives you a rough idea from the top of my head):

486 - 33MHz-120MHz?
Pentium 1 - 90MHz-150MHz
Pentium 2 - 160MHz-~380MHz?
Pentium 3 - 450MHz-1400MHz
- Really covers two generations in terms of speed, with the Athlon Thunderbird - but I can't add any more options.
Pentium 4 - 1300MHz-~3000MHz+
-The plus indicates to select this option if you have anything later (it doesn't really matter here as this sort of CPU will never limit a normal DSL install).

All that in about a decade, by the way.
---------

The hard part has been working out how to class PC "generations". I've decided on the usual method of CPU models. RAM is important too, but it can be upgraded more easilly than a CPU, and (mainly due to this fact) is hard to class in combination with CPU generations.

I'll admit it's all pretty general, and probably hard for those who don't know much about computer hardware, but hopefully this will give a rough idea of what sort of machines DSL is going on to.


For my part, I'm posting from a Pentium 1 120MHz with 81MB RAM (I upgraded it from 32MB, but it worked pretty well beforehand as well). I also use it on an IBM Thinkpad R31 laptop with a Pentium 3 ~1GHz and 512MB RAM, and I've put it on a couple of similar era machines for other people.

[james c]

Mainly on a 733 Mhz/256 Mb ram P3 and an old AMD k-6 2 501 mhz/384 Mb ram and for experimentation an Athlon XP 2400+  2.0 Ghz/1 Gb ram.

[CNK]

Shameless bump - I'm bored with three votes.

[fatmac]

I've just come back to look at how DSL is getting on, only to find it still stuck in 2012. 
So, I've added my CPUs into the vote, all P4 & above nowadays. 

[AE7XQ]

I have just booted up 4.11.RC2 on a Dell Inspiron. Looks sharp. Now I will begin the process of selecting the software I want to download from the "MyDSL" repository and burn that to a disc for installing to it. I can not seem to get the Linksys wireless card to work, but I had expected that might be a problem.

[Benny]

I was back to the forum because needed to know something unrelated to this topic (not mentioning it here).

I was using DSL mainly in an HP-Compaq nx9010. The cpu is intel but don't remember which one but this laptop came with Windows XP Professional which might a good idea what was in it. The RAM was at 512 MB. I stopped using it because it burnt up last year (a Power Supply thing but not at the P/S itself: smoke came out from the laptop and not from the P/S). Haven't opened it, yet; when I finally do I might find something more. Until then, I'm using an old iBook G4 with its OS X in it...

[jharris1993]

Yes. . . .  I know this topic is "stale" - which means maybe it's time to freshen it up a bit!

What do *I* run DSL on?

Short answer:  Whatever I can.

Longer answer:

Systems that are "mentally challenged"   because it's a hoot, and you learn a lot about running a distro efficiently when you are doing it on a "sub-optimal" system.  My latest project is getting it to run on an absolutely ancient Libretto CT50 (P1, 815 meg HD, and a whopping 16 megs of ram).  And it's actually running, albeit slow as molasses.  And that's the challenge:  Can I get a system that reached its peak with Windows 95 to run DSL efficiently and well?

Even if I ultimately decide that this system is just too cramped to run any distro, I will have still learned a lot along the way.  For which I am immensely grateful.

Thanks again for a very useful distribution.

Jim (JR)

[MPS]

IBM X30 PIII 1200 512мб SDRAM133
PIII Celleron 512mb DSRAM133

[james c]

Still running on the same old P3.......