[NBLUG/talk] Request for hardware and distro recommendations

[E Frank Ball]

On Wed, Apr 26, 2006 at 06:49:31PM -0700, Walter Hansen wrote:
} 
} Umm. Maybe I'm a strange one or maybe recent apps have gone memeory crazy,
} but I've got a server using RH9 with 256 (PIII700) and it's snappy under
} KDE and that's the fastest server I've got with the most memory. I'm
} putting up a new server that's much faster and has a gig of memory, but
} that's not for desktop stuff.
} 
} I even had a little RH7.3 box on a celeron 333 with about 64 megs and a
} 2gig drive and it was snappy using gnome/mozilla. Are the new desktops
} bloating so much that they need big memory to even run a desktop?
} 
} My old server was a PentiumPro 150 with 128megs (upgraded to that from
} 64). It did everything and seemed decent to me in KDE. It was running RH8
} or 9 as I remember.


My server until about 7 months ago (when sarge went to stable) was a 60
MHz Pentium classic with 64 MB of RAM.  It served web pages (minimal
cgi), ran a mailserver, mailing lists, etc.  It did not run X.  It was
sluggish at times, but it worked.  Spam filtering put a load on it, but
several seconds per message was OK.  My server is now a dual 300MHz PII
with 256MB of RAM and it is more than enough for hosting several
domains, but I wouldn't like it as a desktop machine.

It is the desktop stuff that has gotten bloated.  Firefox needs several
hundred MB of RAM.  KDE is major bloat, gnome is slightly better.
Openoffice is major bloatware too.  If you pick a minimal window manager
(fvwm, ice, blackbox, etc) and a lightweight browser and skip most of
the office applications (gnumeric for excel files is OK) you can make do
with old hardware.



} As far as drive space, I think you can install everything on a debian box
} and max out at 5-8 gigs, so I don't think a 12 gig presents any problems
} whatsoever. Just not a huge space to stick a movie collection.


12G is NO problem.  My server only uses 2G, and my desktop
uses about 4G for the system.


-- 

   E Frank Ball                frankb at frankb.us