A good Arch experience.

Misfit138 · 2007-11-24 17:41:43

I recently received a free laptop from a friend of mine at work..

He said it was "about 7 or 8 years old, real slow, no ethernet card, and pretty much useless." He said he was just getting rid of it, so I offered to take it.
I fired it up, and after 4 or 5 minutes, it booted into a Windows XP desktop. I decided to check the specs right away. I right-clicked on My Computer and scrolled down to Properties. After another minute or so, it displayed the system specs, to my dismay. Pentium 3, 650Mhz, 188 Megs of RAM. He had originally claimed it was about 256 Megs, to his memory. Luckily, it had a DVD-ROM optical drive, but no burner.
I doubted there was anything I could do with it, but with a challenge in mind, I took it home on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.
In pursuit of an expedient litmus test, I installed PCLinuxOS on the machine (which recommends 256Megs of RAM)...After 45 minutes of the Draklive installer, it was still churning away, and not even 25% done. I went to bed, leaving the machine plugged in.
Thursday morning, I installed XFCE using apt-get and entered the DE.
Totally unusable! The interface was choppy, and lagging constantly. My hopes sunk.
Using the lowmem option, I installed Arch onto it, in about 25 minutes. The harddrive was achingly slow, and small...6 Gigs, which was disappointing. Luckily, I had an extra 5400RPM 30 Gig laptop hardrive sitting on my desk, collecting dust.
After 20 minutes of prying and unfastening, I swapped out the harddrive for the 'new' one, and re-installed Arch. This time, I plugged in a spare D-Link atheros-based wireless card, to see if I could get internet. I installed everything except ppp and rpppoe packages from base, dev, support, and lib. To my surprise, madwifi was thoughtfully included. Using Phrakture's trick, I configured wireless ath0, specifying everything in rc.conf.
The install went much faster with the bigger drive.
Now it was time to type that magic word: reboot
The machine booted quite quickly, except for the udev uevents, which lags for 5-10 seconds.
Ifconfig ath0 told me I had an ip address. Iwconfig ath0 told me I was associated with my essid...and pinging google worked! Time to fire up pacman.
After an upgrade and reboot, it was time to decide on a DE. I love KDE, and crave its spoiling creature-comforts, but I thought it unwise, in light of the system specs. I figured XFCE would better suit the 650Mhz P3 and pitiful 188Megs of RAM.
I have next to no experience using XFCE, so I was in for a learning experience. After downloading and configuring X with the xf86-video-trident driver, I did:
pacman -S xfce xfce-goodies
And fired it up.
Very nice. Very...fast?
The machine was pretty zippy! Clicking on items gave a very unexpected responsiveness.
Time to install the whole gambit. Firefox, which I can't live without, is big and slow, but I tried it anyway, along with flashplugin, mplayer and plugin, codecs, xine, laptop-mode-tools and gwenview.
Everything worked. Wlassistant installed and worked for a day, but started giving me trouble with a DCOPServer error. This was fixed by chowning the .KDE folder in my home directory, which had become root's somehow. Wlassistant rocks!
Amarok works, and as big and slow as it is, it is still acceptable and completely usable. Flash is rendered fine. Even multitasking among the 4 default desktops works amazingly well with very little slow down for normal tasks.
I can make the machine lag, by opening Limewire, Amarok, Firefox and a terminal in 4 different desktops, but after a few moments, the machine actually catches up with itself, and playing music while surfing/typing is completely possible without chop. DVD's also play perfectly well, but only if xine is the only app open.
Cpufreq-utils does not seem to like the old P3, complaining about no such device or some such error, and I have yet to figure out how to suspend, but overall, I am very pleasantly surprised with Arch's ability to breathe new life into this seemingly useless laptop.

Last edited by Misfit138 (2007-11-24 17:45:51)

Sekre · 2007-11-24 17:50:52

cool!

how much swap do you have and use on a normal basis? (xfce,music,firefox)

pretty amazed arch performs so well as it does, really makes for a jolly computer experience

Misfit138 · 2007-11-24 18:03:24

Sekre wrote:

cool!
how much swap do you have and use on a normal basis? (xfce,music,firefox)
pretty amazed arch performs so well as it does, really makes for a jolly computer experience

Here is the output of 'free' with Firefox, terminal, Limewire, and Amarok playing the Deftones:

misfit ~/pics $  free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        182536     178104       4432          0          4      66492
-/+ buffers/cache:     111608      70928
Swap:       979956      55500     924456

As you can see, it's pushing it, but I am typing on it right now, with no slowdown, lag or chop at all.
Here's the output of 'free' with nothing but terminal opened:

misfit ~/pics $  free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        182536     121608      60928          0          4      71400
-/+ buffers/cache:      50204     132332
Swap:       979956      48732     931224

XFCE and Arch..very K.I.S.S..

Last edited by Misfit138 (2007-11-24 18:08:21)

Sekre · 2007-11-24 19:15:11

cool,

that was actually less than I would expect

really cool you can run it with no real slowdowns.
kinda makes me itch to try it on an old computer I have stowed away. It has about the same amount of ram

Jason5876 · 2007-11-25 05:58:53

I must say that Arch seems to run well with old hardware. Right now I am watching "Rocky Balboa" on DVD with mplayer while I have Firefox running (what I am posting with), and I am on a 600mhz, 64mb RAM machine. Right now during the film I have 34mb swap used and 58mb RAM used, there are no stalls or even glitches in the video playback at all. I normally run source based Linux distros, but Arch competes with them in performance I have to admit.

Last edited by Jason5876 (2007-11-25 05:59:53)

Misfit138 · 2007-11-25 14:36:34

Jason5876 wrote:

I must say that Arch seems to run well with old hardware. Right now I am watching "Rocky Balboa" on DVD with mplayer while I have Firefox running (what I am posting with), and I am on a 600mhz, 64mb RAM machine. Right now during the film I have 34mb swap used and 58mb RAM used, there are no stalls or even glitches in the video playback at all. I normally run source based Linux distros, but Arch competes with them in performance I have to admit.

64MB of RAM? That is very impressive. What DE are you using?

Jason5876 · 2007-11-25 18:58:34

Fluxbox is my main window manager, but I also like JWM. Both of course are fairly nice and small and fast. The JWM package is only 120kb in size, but to me has one of the nicest appearances of the small wm's. I installed XFCE to see how it would do and of course it is a little much for this machine, but that was to be expected.

Sekre · 2007-11-25 20:37:49

Jason5876 :
wow !
now That is cool, gotta love how small amount of ram you need on a *nix machine
wish windows were that scalable.

...too bad I found out my stowed away comp was a amd k6 thought it was an old p3 or something....
*sigh* ah well.. could probably run slack on it or something

Arch Linux

#1 2007-11-24 17:41:43

A good Arch experience.

#2 2007-11-24 17:50:52

Re: A good Arch experience.

#3 2007-11-24 18:03:24

Re: A good Arch experience.

#4 2007-11-24 19:15:11

Re: A good Arch experience.

#5 2007-11-25 05:58:53

Re: A good Arch experience.

#6 2007-11-25 14:36:34

Re: A good Arch experience.

#7 2007-11-25 18:58:34

Re: A good Arch experience.

#8 2007-11-25 20:37:49

Re: A good Arch experience.

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