[ltp] "Light" applications for a laptop

Jeff linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org
Wed, 11 Feb 2004 21:03:30 -0500


Luis Lebron wrote:

> I am currently running RedHat 9 on a 770  thinkpad (233Mhz, 96Mb 
> ram).  Eventhough it works certain applications  are  extremely  
> slow.  For example, it  takes  a very long time to start  OpenOffice,  
> Jedit, or Quanta. I am looking  for  suggestion  on  applications 
> that  would work better on an older system. For example, I have found 
> TED (http://www.nllgg.nl/Ted/)  and Nedit are quite responsive.
>
> Any other suggestions?
>
>
> thanks,
>
> Luis
>
 I would consider running an earlier release on the laptop, since the 
later releases are resource hogs. I have a 600 (300Mhz, 128M) and the 
latest distros choke it to a crawl. The quickest distros that I have 
tried on the 600 were JAMD (based on RH9 but recompiled and optimized), 
Libranet 2.7(based on Debian Woody), Slackware (at least as of version 
7), and Mandrake and RedHat  7.2.

    I currently run a modified (mix of stable and testing)Libranet 2.7 
on my 600.  For normal use, there is barely a noticeable difference in 
performance as compared to my desktop running Mandrake 9.2.  Libranet 
also defaults to their customized version of IceWM, which your 770 will 
appreciate. Very light and fast compared to KDE or Gnome, and as shown 
below, easy on the resources.

Linux 2.4.19 (root@puppy) (gcc 2.95.4 20011002 ) #1 1CPU [thinkpad.(none)]

Memory:      Total        Used        Free      Shared     Buffers      
Cached
Mem:        127068      123204        3864           0       14248       
66400
Swap:       196552       19732      176820

Bootup: Wed Feb 11 18:24:16 2004    Load average: 0.22 0.20 0.34

    Jeff