I have an old Dell Latitude C600 that belonged to a family friend. It was made around 2002 and uses an Intel Pentium III‑M (about 850 MHz–1.2 GHz). The board had been shorted — I managed a quick repair , replaced the old hdd witha sata drive but it needed alot of tweaking to work— and then needed an OS that the machine could actually run. Windows was out.
All my other machines run Linux (laptop on Linux Mint, main PC on Fedora), but those distros still ask too much from this hardware. I considered Gentoo, but compiling the kernel and apps on a PIII would be painfully slow and could take weeks.
So I tested Arch Linux in VirtualBox on an old Core i5 on 1 core with 1 GB RAM. The install took about 30 minutes; after adding a lightweight window manager, Firefox, Vim and a few tools, the system uses only ~188 MB RAM. That low footprint makes Arch the best option so far for reviving the C600.
am thinking of using midori rather than firefox to save on more ram.
i will also use zram for those who do not know what it is, it can essentially double your ram.
will i use the laptop for any modern work? no thats what my main rig with Ryzen 7 5800X3D 128gb ram is for, maybe as a diary or a photo album it can be useful or lightweight coding using vim or as an email server or even a router.
nice with xfce using less than 500mb ram thats good but i usually prefer gentoo or arch as i like building my system from the ground up laptop is that running intel atom takes me back to my first ever dell laptop nilipatiwa na mzae
Peasant dreams. Lewa na utafute lanye like others. Those laptops won’t save you from poverty, you have better chances being hiy by a car and going to heaven.
I tried Mint xfce but it wouldn’t work with archaic machines. Then I found MX and decided to give it a try that’s what I’ve been using for clients with ancient PCs. Like a PowerMac from 2003.
zram works as a compressed swap on the ram so it is faster than a hdd or ssd if you set it to the size of your ram using zstd with a compression ratio of anywhere between 3:1-4:1 you can in theory double your ram. its still alittle slower but you get the benefits of using ram speeds for swap. i usually use it on any machine with less than 8gb ram. and use zswap on any machine above 8gb ram which acts as a bridge between ram and swap compressing data before storing it on the swap drive. if you have any machine under 4gb ram you need zswap now just install it and see the difference night and day. if your on fedora it comes installed by default set to half the size of the ram and max to 4gb. And yes using a browser makes the machine useless it’s good as a diary,home-server or watching under 1080p videos, light coding, playing old games e.t.c
below you can see my old 8gb ram laptop with 4gb set zram 1.8gb of data has been compressed to nearly half in ram not am using lzo-rle which is not efficient as zstd.
[quote=“fundimnoma, post:9, topic:581819”]
…ora it comes installed by default set to half the size of the ram and max to 4gb. And yes using a browser makes the machine useless it’s good as a diary,home-server or watching under 1080p videos, light coding, playing old games e.t.c
below you can see my old 8gb ram laptop with 4gb set zram 1.8gb of data has been compressed to nearly half in ram not am using lzo-rle which is not efficient as zstd.
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Good to see someone who knows a few things about linux…
My point is Zram just helps you use your available ram efficiently by creating swap on your ram. What doubles your ram is zswap because it stores the compressed data on the drive.
Personally i combine zram + a swap partition because using zswap hurts my shitty cpu.
