How many arch users are on older hardware?

ssl6 · 2009-03-06 21:53:31

i run KDE4 on my main desktop, athlon x2 6000, 4gb ram, geforce 7900GS, 250gb, 400gb, 750gb, i also use the machine as a lamp server for intranet on my lan, and samba server, mostly for streaming movies. it runs great, its my main rig, i like having all the fany features and easy gui configuration tools. i have a second similar box, X2 4200, geforce 8800 that runs windows for gaming

i've also recently setup a P4 3.0ghz, radeon 9250, 1gb ram (thought it was 512 when i built it), i've been trying the lightweight thing on it, with LXDE, midori, transmission, etc, so far, im liking it, very simple, but very effective

now this thread has me thinking about trying arch on my old k6 400, 256mb, though im not sure if the voodoo 2's would be much use in it? i could scrap together a duron 600/800/1200, or celeron 1.3, or an athlon XP 2500, to toy with, i have a lot of old stuff at my disposal, i should spend more time playing with it

Renan Birck · 2009-03-06 22:36:09

The K6-400 would be i586, so, sorry, no Arch on it.

But, if you can consider my 4-year-old Pentium 4/1,5GB RAM/GeForce FX5200 to be old hardware, yes, Arch works nicely on it. Can even run KDE4 w/eye-candy on, Compiz and some games. Still useful as a desktop machine for light usage.

ssl6 · 2009-03-07 01:44:10

oh yeah, thats right, 586, forgot about that, i just spent an hour digging through boxes for my athlon 1.2, i found about 10 durons during the process, now i need to figure out which of my a7v boards is still good, and decide between an ati rage, geforce2, geforce3 or voodoo 5

sash · 2009-03-07 03:48:18

I use Arch on an Athlon Tbird 2700+ with 1G RAM, primarily as a Mythtv and web browsing box. I use xfce4 as a DE at the moment, but it feels like I should switch to something lighter. I tried compiz when I installed fresh initially, but this machine definitely seemed underpowered for it.

Last edited by sash (2009-03-07 03:51:03)

Ranguvar · 2009-03-07 23:59:04

My main box is an Intel Q6600 - quad-core 2.4GHz - CPU, NVIDIA 9600GT 512MB GPU, roughly a TB of combined storage, and 6GB RAM.

I have an elderly laptop I'm running Arch on, though. It's a ThinkPad T41 (used to run WinXP fair/decent), 1.6GHz Banias Pentium M, Mobility Radeon 7500, 1GB RAM. I've heard it can even do Compiz if you treat it right, so we'll see.

Convergence · 2009-03-08 12:05:29

xterminus wrote:

satanix wrote:
In older i mean around the p4 2gig era no HT.
As i see alot of arch users using light WM and light and fast apps, so i figure alot of users must be on older hardware, thus the need for less resource intense programs.
My workstation is an athlonxp, with a gig of ram. (Not too old). I can easily run gnome and kde. However, it bothered me that after simply booting up my box and autostarting common apps like gaim/firefox, I had over 700 megs of ram already in use. By eliminating gnome/nautilus, I was able to drop that to about 500 megs. (Which leaves me with lots of room to play with). A kde desktop approached 800 megs (probably because my most used apps are gtk based, so all the gtk+qt stuff was being loaded).
There are other considerations too.
An OS is a stack of metaphors and abstractions that stands between you and the guts of your PC, and embodying various tricks the programmer used to convert the information you're working with – be it images, e-mail messages, movies, or word processing documents – into the bytes that are the only things computers know how to work with. When we use the command line to work with our computers, we were very close to the bottom of that stack. When we use most modern DE's, our interaction with the machine is heavily mediated. Everything we do is interpreted and translated time and again as it works its way down through all of the metaphors and abstractions.
I find that icons and fancy eye candy often adds yet another layer of metaphor that adds confusion rather than simplifies common tasks.
By using fancy GUIs all the time we have insensibly bought into a premise that few people would have accepted if it were presented to them bluntly: namely, that hard things can be made easy, and complicated things simple, by putting the right interface on them.
And finally, I tend to work in an xterm of some sort 90% of the time. OpenBox and other similar WM's get "out of the way" and do not provide all the distractions, popups/notifications that DE's do. Which is probably why I prefer OB more than any reason listed above.

I agree. One problem with many layers of abstraction is that it promotes ignorance. Developers do an excellent job of simplifying things that are very complicated, but one side effect is that when a low level problem arises, you are often unprepared to deal with it. For example (and I know that this is off topic) I want to use a custom kernel. A long time ago, I was well prepared to roll my own kernel, and run it. Now after a long time of using pre-built kernels that will run on anything, I'm realizing that it is costing me in performance, and I have forgotten how to build and install my own. A problem has reared it's ugly head, and because of my dependency on layers of abstraction, I am not prepared to deal with it.

By the way, I have two arch systems, one is a p4 1000 MHz 1gig ram with on-board graphics and sound, and the other is an athlon 2400+ with an nvidia 7600 gt and an audigy2 sound card. Boot time is incredibly long on both (working on it; part of the reason I want to roll my own kernel and skip the whole damned initramfs thing) but performance is not bad on either. On the older of the two systems, it takes a huge amount of time to start kde from the login screen, whereas loading fluxbox is more or less instant. Fluxbox is my default work environment on both systems because it loads instantly, and I like the simplicity. I use kde sometimes because I don't know how to use hal events within flux, and sometimes I use convenient extras like knotes etc. I actually prefer to write my own app menu because I don't use 99% of the crap that auto menu generators add. (although the new kde has a very nice search function in their "start menu". I could be wrong, but I don't think that even the highest spec computers can load the new kde, or windows interface instantly. (maybe if they use some kind of ram drive)

Dead Code · 2009-03-08 12:06:52

Is P4 3GHz considered old? Arch runs fine on my 512 MB RAM, Intel Chipset + Onboard Graphics card

cybertorture · 2010-05-31 16:37:24

Last edited by cybertorture (2010-05-31 16:37:44)

xenofungus · 2010-05-31 17:39:43

P4 2GHz, 768MB RAM, Radeon 9200, 80GB HD.

It's my main box, running arch only. It runs xmonad and mostly CLI stuff (which is the way I like it anyway ). Fairly happy with it except for usb 1.1 and some less important stuff.

archman-cro · 2010-05-31 17:51:28

Celeron M 1.7GHz, 1.2GB RAM, compaq nx6310 laptop. Running Arch only. Runs Openbox and Compiz (sometimes when I'm bored with Openbox or want some wanky fancy effects). It runs amazing.

1LordAnubis · 2010-05-31 20:21:22

main laptop: alienware 7700, P4 @ 3 Ghz, 1280 mb ram, 256 mb nvidia geforce 6800, 60 gb hd + 500 gb external hd
Dam, guess its 5 years old now but it still works great w/ openbox/ck patched kernel

and almost 4 yr old thinkpad t60: 1.66 ghz centrino duo, 768 mb ram & intel gfx- uses about 15 watts

Cheifchimp · 2010-06-01 00:52:13

does 2002 vinage IBM eServer X345 (dual 2.8GHz Xeons, 2GB rams, 4 x 36GB U320 scsi's, ultrium 1 tape) count as 'older hardware?

72linus · 2010-06-28 15:43:18

So, here's proof positive ARCH 2010.05 can run on old hardware

Toshiba 7000CT Portege with 266mhz 160MB RAM PentiumII 4GB hard drive

and I manually installed my nFluxOS arch edition to the lappy
http://multidistro.com/downloads/downloads.html

Desktop pic
http://multidistro.com/NFLUXNEW/archtosh.png

specs
cat /proc/cpuinfo

    processor    : 0
    vendor_id    : GenuineIntel
    cpu family    : 6
    model        : 5
    model name    : Pentium II (Deschutes)
    stepping    : 0
    cpu MHz        : 266.630
    cache size    : 512 KB
    fdiv_bug    : no
    hlt_bug        : no
    f00f_bug    : no
    coma_bug    : no
    fpu        : yes
    fpu_exception    : yes
    cpuid level    : 2
    wp        : yes
    flags        : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pse36 mmx fxsr up
    bogomips    : 533.47
    clflush size    : 32
    cache_alignment    : 32
    address sizes    : 36 bits physical, 32 bits virtual
    power management:

and "lspci"

    00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX Host bridge (AGP disabled) (rev 02)
    00:04.0 VGA compatible controller: Neomagic Corporation NM2160 [MagicGraph 128XD] (rev 01)
    00:05.0 Bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ISA (rev 02)
    00:05.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 IDE (rev 01)
    00:05.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 USB (rev 01)
    00:05.3 Bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ACPI (rev 02)
    00:09.0 Communication controller: Toshiba America Info Systems FIR Port Type-O (rev 23)
    00:0b.0 CardBus bridge: Toshiba America Info Systems ToPIC97 (rev 05)
    00:0b.1 CardBus bridge: Toshiba America Info Systems ToPIC97 (rev 05)
    00:0d.0 Multimedia controller: C-Cube Microsystems Cinemaster C 3.0 DVD Decoder (rev 02)
    01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Xircom Cardbus Ethernet 10/100 (rev 03)

Actually ALL four nFluxOS versions run on this lappy, but I wanted ARCH installed 8-)
I installed the ARCH edition manually via /usr/share.doc/manual-install.

Awebb · 2010-06-28 16:02:09

I'd still use Openbox if Compiz didn't turn out to be faster on my laptop, since it utilizes the nvidia chip instead of "wasting" cpu time with window management. until the day I discovered that compiz is more than eye candy, I was a strict eye candy hater, no UI could have been too simple or too minimalistic. Now I learned that some of those 3D features may actually be usefull for my workflow - mostly the expo and the group/tab feature, I also like a precise dose of transparency from time to time. I'd also like to have this paper style "pull the corner of a window and peek behind it" feature, but I seem to unable to find it anymore

cdwijs · 2010-06-30 19:01:10

I have switched from ubuntu to arch for my laptop. (Core 2 duo 1.8Ghz, 2Gig ram, Geforce 8 series) Arch feels faster. Also i don't have to reinstall my system every 6 months (upgrade has bombed on me 3 times). Furthermore, I can tweak arch a LOT more than ubuntu.

My mediacenter also happily runs arch. (P4 1.6, 512MB ram, geforce 2 MX 400 pci) It's fast enough to run mythtv and gnome.

Best regards,
Cedric

bluepumpkin · 2010-07-01 00:53:37

heh... My main machine as of now is a pentium pro at 200MHz with 128 megs of RAM

I spend most of my time programming in C or assembly with vim and surfing the web with links. It actually feels pretty quick with cli applications such as those. Surprisingly, urxvt seems a little snappier than the console at the same resolution, so I spend most my time in X with dwm. I have a Matrox 2064W video card with no real video acceleration so GTK and QT applications are REALLY slow, but FLTK applications are actually fairly fast (at least when double buffering is off ).

Last edited by bluepumpkin (2010-07-01 01:38:21)

Arch Linux

#51 2009-03-06 21:53:31

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#52 2009-03-06 22:36:09

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#53 2009-03-07 01:44:10

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#54 2009-03-07 03:48:18

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#55 2009-03-07 23:59:04

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#56 2009-03-08 12:05:29

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#57 2009-03-08 12:06:52

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#58 2010-05-31 16:37:24

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#59 2010-05-31 17:39:43

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#60 2010-05-31 17:51:28

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#61 2010-05-31 20:21:22

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#62 2010-06-01 00:52:13

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#63 2010-06-28 15:43:18

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#64 2010-06-28 16:02:09

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#65 2010-06-30 19:01:10

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#66 2010-07-01 00:53:37

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

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