PII 300 Good enough for HD install?

**Eradicator** · 09-03-2003, 04:54 PM

I am enjoying fooling around with Knoppix Live CD on this older PC but would like to go with an actual install. I have an old PII300 that I slapped together with 192mb of PC100 ram and a 3 GB HD. Do you think it can handle an install of Knoppix? Should I be looking for a lighter/faster distro? Any suggestions? Very new to linux so be gentle.

Thanks!

**jdong** · 09-03-2003, 05:14 PM

That system will do... as long as you don't enable too much KDE eyecandy.... also, Knoppix will use ~2GB with its default install, so plan accordingly (remove some packages after installation, too

)

**Eradicator** · 09-03-2003, 05:17 PM

Which GUI is the "prettiest" but take up the least space? Would I be better off with GNOME? I also noticed another problem. When I add another 2GB HD I can never seem to get it mounted. It appears to be recognized on the live CD when the text is rolling by. Any help there?

Is there a GUI interface that will allow me to mount this drive or do I need to run a command?

**rickenbacherus** · 09-03-2003, 10:14 PM

I have Knoppix installed to a 233Mhz w 160M RAM. And I use KDE- it's awesome and kicks the crap out of wimpdoze on this same machine.

Which GUI is the "prettiest" but take up the least space?

That's a subjective opinion. I like xfce4 which can be found on the Morphix 4.0 light gui release. It also can be installed and takes up much less space than a standard Knoppix install. Alot of people like Fluxbox and it's included with Knoppix. Of course any GUI you want is only an apt-get away.

You can mount a second drive rather easily. You'll need to have a filesystem on it first tho I beleive. Just do something like so:

sudo mount /dev/hdb /mnt/hdb

This is assuming your hard drive is the primary slave.

Of course the mount point /mnt/hdb must exist or it surely will not work. You can make a mount point like so:

sudo mkdir /mnt/hdb

**unamiccia** · 09-03-2003, 10:16 PM

Once you've installed Knoppix to the hard drive, it's easy to get the second hard drive to mount automatically -- you just need to edit the /etc/fstab file and uncomment (remove the leading "#" character) the line that refers to that drive.

KDE and Gnome are the "pretty GUIs," and the biggest and most resource-intensive. You can play around with KDE and see if it's fast enough to suit you. The first time you run it from the HD installation, KDE will take you through a configuration "wizard" where you can turn off the most resource-intensive eye candy; this could make a big performance difference.

IceWM is a fine alternative window manager that is included in Knoppix; see if you like that. It's much less resource-intensive, and it has a lot of useful keystroke commands to take the place of point-and-click operations. Steve Litt has a useful article about IceWM that describes its strengths and explains how to make the most of them.

**buenafe** · 09-04-2003, 06:12 PM

lazy question - I have a Celeron 400 - yet another slow PC.

I'd like to install Knoppix minus the resource heavy items.

If I do a Knoppix hd install, can I easily remove the resource intensive stuff like KDE and Gnome and other software packages that come on the CD?

**Tacvek** · 09-08-2003, 02:51 AM

Originally Posted by buenafe

lazy question - I have a Celeron 400 - yet another slow PC.

I'd like to install Knoppix minus the resource heavy items.

If I do a Knoppix hd install, can I easily remove the resource intensive stuff like KDE and Gnome and other software packages that come on the CD?

Well if you remove KDE, you would lack a desktop as iirc Knoppix does not come with GNOME.

If you are planning on removing KDE, you are likely not going to be using x11, in which case there are many better Linux distribs to use.

**Dave_Bechtel** · 09-08-2003, 08:30 AM

--Not quite true; there were many other window managers like Afterstep, Icewm, twm, fvwm, fwwm95, CDE, etc around well before KDE and Gnome came out. And they can still be used standalone.

See here for more details:
http://www.freakzone.net/display_area.php?id=4300

--Granted, uninstalling everything relating to KDE and Gnome will remove a lot of useful apps. But it doesn't mean you can't use Xwindows at all.

Originally Posted by Tacvek

Well if you remove KDE, you would lack a desktop as iirc Knoppix does not come with GNOME.

If you are planning on removing KDE, you are likely not going to be using x11, in which case there are many better Linux distribs to use.

**Eradicator** · 09-08-2003, 07:08 PM

I tried installing Mandrake, I used the workstation/internet options so I get a browser, open office, koffice....etc and I must say this thing boots extremely slow. Window98 was much faster (granted no free software). Would Knoppix boot faster? Even the applications open really slow....Konquerer...etc

When I say slow if Window98 takes 1 minute to boot Mandrake takes 3 minutes.

Thanks in advance

**fingers99** · 09-08-2003, 07:29 PM

Hard to say. For what it's worth, I think that both your video card and the amount of ram you have are pretty critical here (Linux likes accelerated cards and loves RAM while Win 9* is very dependent on processor speed). Of course, you can always disable the services you don't need.

FWIW, I used to run a Cyrix 333 box (your P2 should be faster) with 256Mb of Ram and an 8Mb S3 Virge card. It was completely useable -- with Kde -- and returned something like 600 bogo mips. Try turning off the Kde eye candy.