dsl vs older distros

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: dsl vs older distros
started by: yib

Posted by yib on Oct. 25 2005,20:34

Hi everyone,

so dsl vs some older version of linux, say redhat 4.0 or something, on older hardware, which do you guys think will be better? (better performance, easier to use, "looks" better etc).

yib

Posted by WDef on Oct. 27 2005,08:52

Depends on how old the "old" hardware is and how much ram, etc. Also what you want to use it for.

I can tell you that DSl running toram dma on a p3 is far more responsive than either Debian or Fedora (current versions) on that same system with heaps of ram. Myself I probably wouldn't load old versions of Debian/Fedora etc onto a p3.

There are people who run full-blown Debian etc on an old p2 and say it's fine. On a p1 or less I'd definitely use only dsl.

For geeks there's also zipslack etc

Posted by yib on Oct. 28 2005,23:40

I've just been playing around with some distros because I got my hands on a pentium 120 with 16mb ram. Since I got it for free i didnt' want to put in the time and money to upgrade anything.

DSL running on my p3 is of course faster than vast majority of distros out there. I have zenwalk installed as well, and dsl is more responsive. However, I found that dsl with the default settings is laggy on the p120 even when using the small apps. (Ive tried running mozilla ONCE, and it took 10 minutes just to load up). The ram is used up and most of the 64mb swap is consumed pretty fast as well. Turning off all unneeded services and using the minimal theme helps, but it is still choppy. I'm sure DSL wasn't desgined to be run on a 10 year old machine, so I don't expect it to run lightning fast.

I also tried using redhat 5.2 on the same machine, and it runs quicker. Apps open faster (of course, much older apps) and less memory is used. In fact, running redhat 5.2, the swap is hardly used at all; usually only 4 or 5 mb. I actually think running netscape in redhat 5.2 is faster than dillo in DSL.

Since DSL is designed to be small and light, shouldn't it run faster than even an old distro that was meant to be mainstream? I mean, redhat includes fvwm, fvwm95, afterstep, windowmaker AND gnome... or would older distros just work better on old hardware?

Posted by mikshaw on Oct. 29 2005,01:47

What window manager did you choose in RedHat that alowed you better response than DSL? I'm guessing it was not Gnome or windowmaker.

As is the case with any system, older applications were designed on older hardware, and as such were developed with smaller demands. As hardware improves, developers get lazier about how well the software performs on that older hardware, opting instead to focus on more features. Any newer software, no matter what it is, is going to be more demanding than older versions of the same software. This is not something that HAS to be done, but it IS done, just because it CAN be done.

Posted by yib on Oct. 29 2005,23:46

Both fvwm2 and afterstep were more responsive in redhat. Windowmaker was close in performance to windowmaker in dsl. For whatever reason, fluxbox was much slower for me than windowmaker. The down side of course, is that redhat 5.2 is almost 8 years old and it shows. Therefore I'm still going to try to optimize DSL to run faster on the laptop rather than using redhat 5.2. Any tips on that btw?

Posted by cbagger01 on Oct. 30 2005,06:19

Hmm..

Best option is get more RAM

Otherwise, a full DSL install (not frugal) to an EXT2 partition will be slightly faster than a frugal install because the overhead from the transparent decompression will be eliminated.

Certainly, try all of the lowram and the SUPER low ram codes (see the DSL wiki) to reduce memory usage.

If you use the xfbdev server instead of the xvesa server, memory usage will be lessened.

Finally, if you really like the performance of application X from Redhat 5.2, hunt down the sources for the old version of this program and compile it for DSL.

Keep in mind that for some apps like web browsers, even "lightweight" modern browsers will render today's web pages better than most 10 year old web browsers.

Also, if you want a faster "Dillo", grab the older Dillo 0.73 patched from DSL 1.4 or previous livecds and copy it over into your new system.

The new Dillo in DSL 1.5 has better international support, but it does seem a little slower than the older version.