Path: csiph.com!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Mike Easter Newsgroups: alt.linux,alt.os.linux,alt.uu.comp.os.linux.questions Subject: Re: Is Debian still good for GUI stuff in an over 12 yrs. old PC? Date: Thu, 2 Sep 2021 10:50:36 -0700 Lines: 74 Message-ID: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: individual.net OAfc4Xf8/Xs3OeoDYeKFAAvycT8cA21WeycNH5QUI4VcNZBaLX Cancel-Lock: sha1:+qMeNZKF0FlhdaYzi0ZZJOru0Nk= User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.10.0 In-Reply-To: Content-Language: en-US Xref: csiph.com alt.os.linux:70903 alt.uu.comp.os.linux.questions:16 Mike Easter wrote: > I was able to workaround the old 2G machine's balky optical tray, but > for some reason the Plop manager to boot from USB is failing for that. Bro-ther. Working around the optical tray problem AND the plop boot manager crashing problem was a mess. I resolved it by *removing* the USB to prevent the plop from crashing right after it said 'loading ehci drivers'. W/ no usb stick, then plop came up w/ an error msg about no media try again. Then I inserted the stick and got the plop boot screen to select the USB and then it succeeded. I finally got the Deb 11 KDE non-free booted on the old low resource machine, which boot was very slow and actually used even more resources live to the desktop than on the boxen w/ 8G ram. The Deb doesn't have a default nntp agent, nor inxi, so I installed inxi and I'll sneakernet the inxi hardware info into this msg. That machine has resources similar to Ant's old cpu, low speed, low ram. I would say that Deb KDE would be 'marginal' on Ant's hardware. Notice how much of the ram is used doing nothing but running inxi. If one were going to run live on an older slow machine w/ only 2G ram, you would surely need to give it some kind of swap on something. If I wanted a modern Deb, I would choose a Sparky + a WM like OpenBox. The community Sparkies have a wide variety of WMs if you have a fave. $ inxi -F System: Host: debian Kernel: 5.10.0-8-amd64 x86_64 bits: 64 Desktop: KDE Plasma 5.20.5 Distro: Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye) Machine: Type: Desktop System: Compaq Presario 061 product: RK554AA-ABA SR2027X NA680 v: 0nx1411RE101NAOS 00 serial: Mobo: ASUSTek model: NAOS v: 1.05 serial: BIOS: Phoenix v: 3.00 date: 06/30/2006 CPU: Info: Single Core model: AMD Athlon 64 3500+ bits: 64 type: UP L2 cache: 512 KiB Speed: 2200 MHz min/max: 1000/2200 MHz Core speed (MHz): 1: 2200 Graphics: Device-1: NVIDIA G84 [GeForce 8400 GS] driver: nouveau v: kernel Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.11 driver: loaded: modesetting unloaded: fbdev,vesa resolution: 1366x768~60Hz OpenGL: renderer: NV84 v: 3.3 Mesa 20.3.5 Audio: Device-1: NVIDIA MCP51 High Definition Audio driver: snd_hda_intel Sound Server: ALSA v: k5.10.0-8-amd64 Network: Device-1: NVIDIA MCP51 Ethernet type: network bridge driver: forcedeth IF: enp0s20 state: up speed: 100 Mbps duplex: full mac: 00:18:f3:f1:b5:44 Drives: Local Storage: total: 115.52 GiB used: 3.62 GiB (3.1%) ID-1: /dev/sda vendor: Seagate model: ST3120213AS size: 111.79 GiB ID-2: /dev/sdb type: USB vendor: Lexar model: JD FireFly size: 3.73 GiB Partition: ID-1: / size: 990.9 MiB used: 398.7 MiB (40.2%) fs: overlay source: ERR-102 Swap: Alert: No Swap data was found. Sensors: System Temperatures: cpu: 40.0 C mobo: N/A gpu: nouveau temp: 98.0 C Fan Speeds (RPM): N/A gpu: nouveau fan: 0 Info: Processes: 166 Uptime: 20m Memory: 1.94 GiB used: 1.81 GiB (93.5%) Shell: Bash inxi: 3.3.01 -- Mike Easter