Weblog entry #146 for ajt
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Today I got my hands on my father's new Viglen MPC-L (a FIC ION A503). It was a cheap deal and it will be faster than his current P2-233 clunker and use less electricity if nothing else...
The unit arrived running an old Xubuntu install and feels quite sluggish. For my father I'm going to reinstall with Debian Lenny and run KDE rather than Xfce because I've found Debian tends to be faster than Ubuntu and I'm more familiar with KDE and find it easier to tune than anything else.
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I don't want to knock Ubuntu users but there much vaunted distro is just Debian with sane install defaults and brown wrapping. It's a fine distro but given that it's 99% Debian it's hardly surprising. If you know what you are doing, Debian is a more flexible environment that does not make assumptions for you.
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"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
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My guess would have been that xfce/xubuntu would feel snappier.
PJ
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I will report back. my gut feeling is that a properly tuned Debian/KDE will be faster than default Ubuntu/xfce. Recent reviews I've read suggest that xfce isn't really that fast and that KDE properly tuned isn't that slow.
If I wanted fast I'd use Fluxbox or similar - that's really fast. My dad isn't really that interested in raw speed, it's more about basic functionality and usefulness in this case.
A 400MHz AMD (NatSemi) Geode is never going to be a speed daemon, but it's small and silent which is probably better than my father's antique Compaq!
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
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I'll grant you it isn't that fast but I'd say it's actually no worse than xfce.
From the command line it's not that bad actually as long as it's not doing anything that takes a lot of effort... ;-)
GUI stuff isn't as fast as my 2 GHz AMD64 box but compared to Windows XP on my work P4 3 GHz machine, KDE doesn't feel that bad on a 400 MHz AMD Geode...
In the end it will be marginally faster than the P2-233 my father currently has and that is already KDE on Etch, so KDE on Lenny is what my father is most familiar with and with tuning it will suffice for basic email and browsing.
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
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