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light linux distribution for P4-M 2.0?

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thinkpadcollection
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light linux distribution for P4-M 2.0?

#1 Post by thinkpadcollection » Mon Oct 24, 2016 4:33 pm

On A31p and later notebooks.

I tried few distributions and is bugged by how menus are designed while navigating them. Is there is any much easier user interface for window desktop overall design? My favorite is ubuntu but are now bloat design and slow and this design is not migrated to other light disbributions.
One I rather liked is Linux Mint xfce but menu system design is awkward.

Sony vaio VGN-645p display corrupted using ubuntu 16.10 but other distributions worked.

I do not like the opensuse now, there is no way to reinstall once installed. I tried, and install did not appear again on usb stick that was used to install the opensuse on computer. I have to go nuclear on it by installing with different distribution over opensuse 42.1 to work.

Cheers, thinkpadcollection

brchan
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Re: light linux distribution for P4-M 2.0?

#2 Post by brchan » Mon Oct 24, 2016 5:23 pm

BunsenLabs linux should run well. It is based off of crunchbang, which was based off of debian with minimal bloatware and I found it to offer the best performance to ease of use compared to other distros on my T23.

The biggest performance hit will probably be from the GUI. Icewm will give you excellent performance but look like W95. Openbox is also light, but I wouldn't try anything heavier.
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Re: light linux distribution for P4-M 2.0?

#3 Post by Dekks » Mon Oct 24, 2016 7:34 pm

puppylinux with jwm btw give 16.10 a month or so to settle down then try it again.
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Re: light linux distribution for P4-M 2.0?

#4 Post by ajkula66 » Mon Oct 24, 2016 7:41 pm

The latest Debian-based Mint (Betsy) is actually decent on A31p, at least IMO.
...Knowledge is a deadly friend when no one sets the rules...(King Crimson)

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George (your grouchy retired FlexView farmer)

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tom lightbody
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Re: light linux distribution for P4-M 2.0?

#5 Post by tom lightbody » Mon Oct 24, 2016 7:44 pm

my suggestion is, avoid the GUIs entirely, for they are resource wasting
hogs that are in no event necessary. Just recently I installed Debian
"jessie" on an a22p, no problem: when the installer gets to the "Install
Additional Software" stage, I un-x the GUI alternative, and proceed with
452 additional files, until I get a bootable system.

then, in order to run a standard web browser, I install a window
manager--fvwm, with 6 virtual consoles, plus various other utilities.
One console is for firefox, another has my to-do list, the calculator,
and an xterm window for the root user; another has the editor emacs: the
other three are xterms where I do what I want to do.

no drop-down menus, no pointing and clicking outside the browser: fast
and efficient, even on old hardware. So that is my suggestion.
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Re: light linux distribution for P4-M 2.0?

#6 Post by Omineca » Tue Oct 25, 2016 12:44 am

I like LXDE on plain old Debian. It's snappy on my Toshiba P4-M 1.8 GHz, and quite good on my 390X PIII 450 MHz. The 390X takes a while to boot up though, and web browsing is practically impossible.
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Re: light linux distribution for P4-M 2.0?

#7 Post by Dekks » Tue Oct 25, 2016 12:53 am

tom lightbody wrote:my suggestion is, avoid the GUIs entirely, for they are resource wasting
hogs that are in no event necessary. Just recently I installed Debian
"jessie" on an a22p, no problem: when the installer gets to the "Install
Additional Software" stage, I un-x the GUI alternative, and proceed with
452 additional files, until I get a bootable system.
You might want to look at tiling window managers like i3/spectrwm & the growing body of console apps - twms also handle non console stuff like firefox.
Home - Win 10 MSi GF63 Gaming Laptop /Arch GNOME 3/X230 Tablet /X61 [Korean] - Debian 10/T60p - Ubuntu 20.10 Helix 2
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Re: light linux distribution for P4-M 2.0?

#8 Post by brchan » Tue Oct 25, 2016 10:14 am

Lightweight GUIs will certainly make your system snappier and very usable for office plus most programming tasks, but if you want to do any fully featured web browsing, no amount of gui or system optimization will offset the resource costs. You can only run scaled back browsers like dillo, links, etc. I would not want to use anything slower than a T60 for web surfing.

Also, there is a nice comparison of the memory usage of different window managers and desktop environments:
https://l3net.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/ ... -desktops/
Current Thinkpads: W530 (functional classic keyboard mod), X301, T61, T60, T43, A31p, T23, 600X, 770
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Re: light linux distribution for P4-M 2.0?

#9 Post by rumbero » Tue Oct 25, 2016 3:56 pm

May i suggest Window Maker Live from wmlive.sourceforge.net?

It is an installable Debian/Jessie live system relying on the very memory efficient Window Maker window manager as it's default GUI.

According to the aforementioned l3net.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/a-memory-comparison-of-light-linux-desktops, regarding resource usage Window Maker is in the very same league as Openbox and even much better than FVWM, but with the added benefit of a much more comfortable user interface.

I wouldn't recommend using it on a T23, though, as the Savage GPU is not able to provide sufficient color depth for Window Maker. Such a pity...
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Re: light linux distribution for P4-M 2.0?

#10 Post by jaspen-meyer » Tue Oct 25, 2016 7:10 pm

thinkpadcollection wrote:One I rather liked is Linux Mint xfce but menu system design is awkward.
I use xfce and this menu:
http://www.jesseo.com/kites/xfce4-menu.png

If you want to use a similar layout in mint I'll dig around for the configuration file.

If you use firefox be sure to add 'noscript' - it does wonders for protecting your machine from useless javascript which'd otherwise taunt the cpu.
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thinkpadcollection
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Re: light linux distribution for P4-M 2.0?

#11 Post by thinkpadcollection » Thu Oct 27, 2016 6:25 pm

I did little dabbling in crunchbang previously. I knew this forked to bunsenlabs and was unsure how light it is so lit off the qbittorrent and downloaded one and tried it on A31p. Works well on bootup times except for crushing the CPU when viewing photos on firefox loading them and scrolling via google images for example, viewing watchlist & auction searches on ebay so on and some ads sometimes as well. Now currently donwloading one for T42 in R52 chassis as this bunsenlabs has no-pae distribution as well.

How will this P4-M bump from 2.0 to 2.5GHz handle this firefox's CPU crushing thing better by your experience?

What I like about bunsenlabs is right click a menu to launch anything is also fine with me.

Want to mention more capable computers I still like ubuntu but this also cracked the VAIO's 8400M GS GPU; massive corruption, other distributions works fine. This is few notebooks with no wireless whitelist by default and can take penryn CPUs. So I chose AR9380 and this detected properly.
:)

PS: when I redid windows 7 on main PC, then last summer for windows 10 (optiplex 780, intel PT giga ethernet, E8600, 16GB, HD3650 and pair of old hitachi sundry 7200 drives, 500GB, 320GB) few years ago, I went dry on firefox addons: no flash, no java, straight HTML5. Worked rather well, no stuttering.

Cheers, thinkpadcollection

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