[Techtalk] Re: IDE Controller support

[Caitlyn Martin]

On Mon, 26 Aug 2002 18:52:00 +0100
Sophie <sophie at cats.meow.at> wrote:

Julie wrote:
> > The oldest desktop box in the house is a 166MHz Pentium (a
> > Dell Dimension XP 166, I think).  It used to run DELL UNIX
> > really well, and older versions of RedHat quite adequately.
> > Today it is =so= incredibly slow.
> 
> nod. This is an issue I have with Linux - over time, it seems to be
> getting bigger and bigger (although obviously supports more).

Most Linux distros can be stripped down and slimmed down until
performance is decent for selected or limited tasks, whether desktop or
server.  I've got RH 7.3 running (not crawling) on a P75 with 32MB of
RAM, and even functioning on a 75 MHz 486 with 16MB of RAM.

> Obviously compared to a desktop system rendering things in realtime
> 3d, it would suck, btu that's not what I use it for.

Yes, but as you pointed out in something I snipped you can dedicate
machines to tasks that don't clobber those old CPUs -- firewalls, mail
server, file server, etc...  My old Toshiba Librettos also basically
serve as funny looking PDAs.
> 
> The slowest machines I have (not x86) run commercial unicies, which
> still feel fast, presumablly because they were written specifically
> for that architecture.

My SGI O2 is a great example of that.

All the best,
Caity