Mandrake 6.1 and Mageia 8 on a Pentium II

[alejandrocobo]

Hi guys! I've been playing with an old laptop: a Compaq Armada 1750 that comes with a Pentium II at 333MHz and 64MB of RAM. To check how was the grandfather of Mageia, I installed Mandrake 6.1. I have to say that it impressed me in how well it worked.

Then I installed Mageia 8. Before that I put 128MB of extra RAM to have 192MB. I was able to boot Mageia and run Firefox but the performance was pretty bad mainly because of the amount fo RAM (the system was using the swap partition all the time).

So, here you have a video of the tests I did on Peertube: https://video.hardlimit.com/w/4ATF2TjKk ... tart=30m9s
If you prefer Youtube, here you have the same video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlBCroUsWAQ&t=1809s

I hope you like it!

[sturmvogel]

I was able to boot Mageia and run Firefox but the performance was pretty bad mainly because of the amount fo RAM (the system was using the swap partition all the time).

No wonder. The minimum requirements for a modern Mageia system are listet here
https://www.mageia.org/en-gb/support/

Memory (RAM): 512MB minimum, 2GB recommended; For headless systems that minimum can be usable. For low memory intensive programs and light graphical Desktop Environments like Xfce the minimum is 1GB. For more feature rich like Gnome and Plasma the minimum is 2GB.

[benmc]

cool video!

I see that you installed LXDE, there are some lighter DE/WM available, so some applications may launch faster as there is more "available" ram.

Firefox: yes, the on .iso version is able to "run" on an SSE flagged CPU. later versions require SSE2 or higher to function correctly.
if you run

Code: Select all

lscpu

on this hardware, it is likely to return that you have just SSE as one of the flags.
some applications will just not run on your CPU at all due to SSE2 and above requirement.
this issue is beyond Mageias control.

thanks for sharing.

[doktor5000]

Thanks!

At first I wanted to run Plasma just out of curiosity but I am not that much a masochist. I guess I was lucky about being able to run Firefox. I find pretty amazing a current distro can run on such an old hardware to be honest. I guess P6 is the base of everything today even though there might be software requiring higher x86 instructions sets as you said.