Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Linux on slow computer Episode 1


Well, I’m back at home now and I’m on holidays so I’m too free and decided to look out for old computers to try out linux and I found a Pentium III 800 MHZ 256MB Ram with 10GB hard disk (IDE).
I tried out Vector Linux (STD) on it. For those who don’t have a clue about vector linux, you can visit www.vectorlinux.com, it is based on Slackware, installation is in text mode and it is not that easy for a beginner (let me remind you to read the manual 1st before you try installing), XFCE interface, uses XMMS to play music, MPlayer and Xine to play videos and I must say they changed the skins and made it as default which is pretty impressive as they definately look better than downloading it yoursef with very ugly skin as default for MPlayer. I’ve never liked MPlayer because of the looks. I don’t need a very good looking player but at least lookable.
As for internet browsers, it comes with Firefox, Opera and Seamonkey. Well I sticked with Opera as it was the fastest loadin, Pidgin to connect to MSN, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, GoogleTalk and so on. They did a good job in creating VASM (Vector Linux’s Administration and System Menu) - a graphical tool which helps configure systems and network adminitrations. K3B, Xfburn is the burning tools, ripperX and X264 is the audio and video ripper. It comes with Adobe Reader 8, Abiword(replacement for MS Word), Gnumeric Spreadsheet, Scribus and a calculator.
It comes with one of my favourite games as well, Mega Mario. It was quite good. It was running fast, graphical boot (I didn’t get that with Ubuntu), it had the basic need mostly I would say. You could even make the panels and windows transparent(like Vista effect) and it didn’t become slow. I rather install this than have any Windows installed in it. Thanks to people that created it. There are few versions on Vector Linux, but I used the standard edition as it was the fastest available for my computer because I like speed. I could have installed the KDE version but I’m not a fan of KDE so i decided to install the XFCE instead. Thank you. Next I’ll try Xubuntu. Till then.