A week with Zenwalk 5.0 on an Old PC…
It was about some 2 months ago that I wrote about an OLD PC where I wanted to install a good Linux and be able to surf the net and play videos and songs occasionally use BitTorrent client on. And I had written that I found Knoppix 3.8.2 to be the best suited one, but as Knoppix does not give any flexibility on the installer and is not actually light on the system when using Firefox or even Amarok, I switched on Zenwalk 4.6.
This adventure went on pretty well if you leave out that part where the system was still a lot slow. Then, in last month, I downloaded Zenwalk’s latest, 5.0 version and been using it exclusively for a week (My laptop dies again…. I am not going into the usual HP SUCKS stuff now).
What I have found in this week is that, till the time where you run only one application among the Media and Office or Network category, the system is very smooth considering the age of that system (Pentium-II, 500Mhz, 96MB SDRAM). But as soon as I put up another application, the system degrades. The CPU cycles are consumed like pies and the utilization is 100% on most of the part.
Again, if I try using any newer technology websites (ajax, java, flash, etc) then IceWeasel hangs. If I see it that way, then Firefox is a memory hog and has a tendency to eat up the system resources and hang the system. So I am again off to searching a distribution that has all the codecs for Audio and Video playing and has a descent web browser.
As for Zenwalk, it still remains one of the very few Linux Distributions that I have come to like.
This entry was posted on Sunday, February 10th, 2008 at 1:38 pm and is filed under Article, Internet, Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
