[GRLUG] on a PowerBook G4

[Don Ellis]

Minimum was 128MB, but OSX 10.1 ran much faster when that was bumped
up to 384MB on my PB G3. When I shopped for RAM for an older unit a
while back, the prices I first found were much higher than the prices
actually charged; bumping it up to a Gig might not cost much at all,
and could speed things up a lot.

You prefer Debian over Ubuntu; what's your opinion on CentOS
derivatives, such as YD? They seem to be mainly focusing on PS3
series, but PowerPC Macs are still on their supported list.

Wondering what is installed on the unit right now. 9.1 was the
original OS, but it can run up to MacOSX 10.4. I have several machines
running at that level that are doing quite well. Check the specs, and
you might even be able to bump it up to 10.5 (Leopard), depending on
which specific model this is and how much RAM, which is really not bad
at all.

--Don Ellis


On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 1:55 PM, Kyle <dontwantspam1 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> On 01/11/2012 08:28 AM, Ben Rousch wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 7:58 AM, Topher<topher at codeventure.net>  wrote:
>>>
>>> I don't remember how much RAM this one has, but the minimum for that
>>> platform was 128.  That makes me want to do something like debian, and
>>> strip
>>> it down as much as I can.
>>
>> I think the base Xubuntu install with no user programs was using
>> 280MB, so there's definitely room to shave it down. A certain person
>> (not me) who regularly hangs out in the IRC channel and at the
>> Wednesday Socials has some experience doing that.
>
>
> If you can get it installed, stop by tomorrow and I'd be happy to help you
> strip it down.  I did a presentation on doing just that a while back but am
> unfamiliar with installing to Macs.  If you can't, bring it anyway and we'll
> see if we can figure it out.  Right now I've got two ARM devices that I
> regularly carry around with me that run Debian.
>
> I'd strongly suggest Debian over Xubuntu if you've got less than 1GB of RAM
> and want easy package management.  I've found it to be much, much leaner in
> general.  Another option that I've had very good luck with for resource
> usage is Gentoo.  Once it's set up, I've found updates to be much more
> stable than Ubuntu.
>
> Other things I'd suggest:
>
> 1. Don't use GDM.  Use SLiM instead.  Resources are fairly minimal and it
> still looks reasonably good.
>
> 2. Don't use Network Manager.  Too many dependencies.  Use Wicd instead.
>
> 3. For anything you use that requires GTK, find an alternative.  The
> dependencies are a serious memory hog.  For anything that you need that uses
> it, don't start it on boot.
>
> 4. XFCE's my desktop environment of choice, but look into other window
> managers like IceWM while watching your memory consumption.  You might like
> what you find.
>
> 5. If you need a lot of things that rely on GTK, ignore everything else on
> this list and just use GNOME.  Believe it or not, I've found you end up with
> lower memory consumption due to GTK programs pretty much loading all of the
> same junk regardless, so you now have that plus whatever other desktop
> environment you loaded.
>
> 6. If you're going to go with Ubuntu over Debian, don't start with Ubuntu
> Desktop.  Don't start with Xubuntu.  Start with Ubuntu Server and add as few
> XFCE (or other desktop environment) packages as you can get away with.
>  Xubuntu's chock full of more junk to make it useful out of the box than you
> probably need under the assumption that the average person has RAM to spare.
>  Debian doesn't seem to have as big of a problem in this regard.
>
> 7. Do regular package audits.  Updates/upgrades like to install extra junk
> you don't need.  If you've got a small hard drive, you can free up a lot of
> space by removing stuff you've never heard of.
>
> IIRC my system booted into a full XFCE desktop with 128MB of RAM and I was
> able to run Firefox (another memory hog) in an actual useful manner in under
> 256MB.  That was with Xubuntu, so I'm sure I could have pushed it further if
> I had switched to another distro.  Gentoo's awesome in that regard - I used
> to run with about 150MB of usage with programs running.  I've since added
> more stuff (Bluetooth, Compiz, preloaded filesystem cache, etc.) and am up
> to probably 500MB-ish, but I don't think it's ever needed as much RAM as any
> of the Ubuntu variants for the same amount of functionality.
>
> - Kyle
>

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