08042009

One of the most significant problems with that PC is that it only has 256 MB of ram installed (now). PCLinuxOS was actually working reasonably well with only 192 MB, but anything much more modern would be happier with, say, 512 MB fitted. I had a look at the price of PC133 ram from just one supplier, Ebuyer, the other day, and I was a little surprised. They did have, until I bought the last two sticks, 128 MB for just £8, but 256 MB ram is listed at over three times the price at £24.99. I could have bought a couple of 256 MB sticks, but I reckon I can get them cheaper somewhere if only I could be bothered to look. However I did buy the last two 128 MB sticks, and although that would not give me any extra memory, it could come in handy for a couple of other old motherboards I have.

While I was off work yesterday I tried two other oldish Linux ditributions to see how they fared on that old machine.

First off was Linux Mandrake 9·2. Mandrake (now called Mandriva) was one of the first Linux distributions I ever used successfully (possibly version 7.2), and although I found later versions seemed to give me difficulties, I do have a certain amount of affection for it.

The installation was simple and almost flawless. About the only problem was one which I have encountered several times on many of these experiments. The screen resolution is a bit jumpy. Mandrake never achieved full resolution for my 1280x1024 monitor, and my earlier experiments with Linux Mint 6 gave some variable results too. I think it is reasonable to put the blame on the Intels graphics chip, and more specifically the mere 1 MB of ram that is allocated to it. It is really pushing it to achieve full resolution at a decent colour depth from so little memory. On a lower resolution LCD display I expect these problems would go away.

The one major problem with Mandrake 9.2 is that the old software repositories have moved, or even been deleted. I did try and track a couple down, but I didn't want to waste too much time on it. Without those online repositories it was impossible to install any new, or upgraded software, although the software on the two CD roms was pretty comprehensive. So I shut down Mandrake and connected another spare hard drive up.

This time I tried an old version of Linux Mint. It was version 4 and used the Xfce desktop. As I have remarked before, Linux Mint is a variant of Ubuntu Linux, and even shares some of the same software repositories. The one less significant difference is that Linux Mint tries to avoid duplication of applications with similar features (i.e. just one office application). The major difference is that Linux Mint does away with the truly appalling sludgy brown colour scheme that Ubuntu uses, and has it's own beautifully crisp, clear, green colour scheme. Of course given enough patience you can configure Ubuntu to any mad colour scheme you like, and all with just a lot of mouse clicking, but it's nice to have most of the work done for you, in a way that is pleasing to the (personal) eye.

Like all the distributions I have tried recently, installation is just a few mouse clicks, and a wait for it to do it's stuff. I prefer to manually configure my hard disk partitions, and so my installation used a few more mouse clicks than was strictly needed.

Once the installation had completed it rebooted the machine and everything just worked apart from the monitor being at a lower resolution than the best one for it. Linux Mint thought that 1024x768 was a good enough resolution, and on a CRT monitor that would have been fine. Unfortunately most LCD monitors only give the sharpest picture when running at their native resolution. The pcture I got wasn't bad, but it was just a tiny bit "edgy". The worst problem was that if I restarted the X server the resolution would mysteriously drop to 800x600, and that did look very bad. Upon rebooting the machine the resolution would go back up to 1024x768. I don't know what was happening there, but I did notice the same thing when I had tried Linux Mint 6 a little while ago. I suspect, and one day I may even try it, that Ubuntu would do the same thing. It is probably some quirk of the onboard Intel graphics, and my high reolution LCD monitor. It is annoying, but not fatal because a reboot will cure it, and restarting the X server would be a comparatively rare thing to do anyway.

So is there a conclusion to all this experimenting ? There is - sort of - and it's this :- The most successful Linux distributions on this old machine, mainly hampered by low memory, are ones that are from the same era that the machine comes from. That's hardly a revelation, but it's the best conclusion I can come up with. Actually the same would be true if running Windows on it. I reckon either Windows 98SE, or Windows 2000 would run well on it. However, having said that, when I was using that machine in my bedroom (mainly just as a rather large mp3 player) I had it dual booting with PCLinuxOS 2007 and (I think) Windows XP as the two boot choices. As I recall both were quite usable, but maybe a certain amount of patience was required while waiting for applications to load etc. Now I have added an extra 64 MB to the machine both those operating systems may be a little more responive. If I have the time or inclination I might do, and report on, some timings on things to happen with all the choices of operating systems I have installed on various hard disks for that machine. I expect I will have the time, but I am not sure about the inclination, over the long Easter weekend.