LXDE running on 11-year old Pentium 1 system 166 MHz

[edward]

I noticed on the About LXDE page that it has been tested on a 266 MHz Pentium II system.

I thought you would all like to know that I have LXDE running with (currently) Mandriva Linux 2009 Cooker (release candidate) on an 11-year old Pentium/MMX 166 MHz (Pentium 1) system with 256 Mb of PC100 memory. It contains a 5400 RPM hard drive.

Once logged in, the LXDE desktop comes up very fast on this system. But obviously due to the slower CPU, some applications would understandably run slower. I sometimes call this my test system, because if something will run on this, it ought to run on almost anything.

[firmit]

Cool! Very cool!

[NoEffex]

With that being said, it could theoretically happen that in the near future LXDE were to attain more proggy's, that it would universally be faster . My vouch is for LXDE.

[edward]

I removed the Cooker installation and it is now running Mandriva 2009.0 (Official). LXDE is still running great on it, without any problems to report.

[archibald haddock]

I am running it on a 300 MHz PentiumMMX (i586, but chost i486 for my laptop) with 64MB and Gentoo on it and LXDE runs quite well.
I am thinking about installing it on my other PCs.

[edward]

If it runs well on your MMX/300, even with 64 Mb memory, I would definitely consider it for the other PC's.

Because GNOME runs rather slow on the MMX/166, I have LXDE set as the default desktop at login on that.

[archibald haddock]

Installed it and merged it with xfce. Runs clearly faster than Xfce. LXFE.

[edward]

For lightweight (and/or slow) systems, I think LXDE is the perfect desktop environment for such systems.

Although this has nothing directly to do with LXDE, on the MMX/166, I added the nopinit kernel parameter which turns off parallel initialization when the system is booting up. It takes the MMX slightly longer to boot up (and faster to shut down - which was a surprise), but it appears to be less taxing on the CPU as it boots up, given its speed.

[archibald haddock]

Do you mean internal kernel init or than the runlevels (openrc ...)? I just can say, to parallel rcs with gentoo is total crap, cause all are waiting for everyone and there checks are keeping the dependecies form coming up, so more checks...

[edward]

When I looked at the console messages, there were two messages for each item that loaded in when using nopinit. I have read that by using it, it can also help to diagnose where a problem exists when booting up, by displaying those extra messages.

As far as I know, it is only for the kernel init and does not affect any of the runlevels.