| Peter D. 2005-10-29, 2:47 am |
| Kikachi wrote in comp.os.linux.hardware:
[snip]
> Thanks, I've managed to get my PCI nvidia card to work and disabled
> the build-in S3 graphic chip. The old socket 7 motherboard didn't have
> the option to select a primary display adaptor.
Socket 7. I remember them.
> I pull out the pci
> nvidia card and plug it in again, switching the pc on and off for
> numerous times before the bios selected the PCI card as the primary
> display.
That is probably not the official method.
> Then I reinstalled debian from scratch. Xserver then had no
> problem initializing the PCI card.
A success is a success.
> My system is an old Compaq Presario running on a Pentium 166mhz CPU
> and 128 EDO ram. Even with the nvidia tnt card with 16mb vram. The
> system still run gnome on debian very slowly. Then I switch to DSL
> (damn small linux) that
> uses the less resource intensive fluxbox windows manager. DSL runs
> slightly better than genome on debian R3.1 but still too slow for
> general usage. This system was running Windows 98 a bit faster than
> even DSL. One odd thing I noticed was the CPU & physical ram usage
> wasn't even up to 50%. No swap was used out off the 512mb swap
> partition.
Gnome and KDE are resource hogs and I would not recommend either
for such a slow machine. Fluxbox is one of several lightweight
window managers that exist. I don't know which one is
fastest. There are proprietary video drivers available from Nvidia,
but don't play with them until you a confident about running the
rest of your system. Also your card is too old for the latest
Nvidia driver.
You could try stopping services that you don't need, try another
window manager, try using the command line. Not having to use
swap space is good.
> I first decided to switch this win98 Pentium 166 system to linux
> because my sister was infecting it spywares and adwares which slowed
> the system horribly. I had the feeling that Linux was going to run
> smoother than win98 on this old system. Somehow I figured that I
> haven't configured linux to run efficiently on my P166 system because
> I've heard many stories on the net of people running linux on even
> slower machines smoothly. Please teach me on configuring debian to run
> efficiently on my P166 system?
This is outside my area of expertise. It is time to start a new
thread, probably in a Debian newsgroup if that is what you are going to
run. Be prepared to do some reading.
Good luck.
--
Peter D.
Sig goes here...
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