[K12OSN] K12Linux Legacy Pc's

Sudev Barar sbarar at gmail.com
Thu Jul 7 04:29:28 UTC 2005


On 7/6/05, Les Mikesell <les at futuresource.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-07-06 at 11:18, Petre Scheie wrote:
> > The rule of thumb is a Pentium class machine is the 'lowest' you want to use for
> > clients.  Machines with 486 chips can be made to work, but they tend to be frustratingly
> > sluggish at best, and since they often don't have PCI slots, getting the NIC and sound
> > cards recognized is much harder.  A 100mhz Pentium with 32MB of RAM will work very
> > nicely.  I recall that someone on the list did some benchmarks a couple years ago, and
> > found that there wasn't any benefit for the client to be any faster than 166mhz and 32MB
> > RAM. Faster, more memory didn't hurt, but the users didn't perceive any better
> > performance.  And the performance difference between a 75mhz client and 166mhz client is
> > small.
> 
> I'd expect a more visible difference in client speed from the quality of
> the video card and how well it's X driver works.  Are there any
> published benchmarks that apply to old cards with current drivers?

>From personal experience I found almost all P-1's able to run as
terminals with following observations:
1. Client RAM 32Mb Plus SWAP enabled for 64Mb
2. Display cards with 2Mb VidRAM
3. Monitors - hard to describe but trade off is between price and resolution.
4. Try not to use floppies but burn EPROM and use on NIC card.
5. Clients with RAM as low as 8Mb will work with SWAP enabled but will
slow down drastically if any heavy application is launched. Good
enough for browsing only.

HTH 

-- 
Sudev Barar
Learning Linux




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