Anybody running on an old computer?

[Member bobbiecb]

I installed antiX recently because it looked light enough to run on a Pentium 4 computer I had lying around. It works great. Runs fast and I like having Conky there so I can monitor my resource use. Pretty important when you have limited ram (1.5 gig right now, three ddr2 512 meg sticks). I especially like the fact you can download so much current software. I installed several browsers and can see which works best on my hardware. This is the first debian package system I’ve ever used, I didn’t know you could use Synaptic with it plus the Package Manager too. that’s nice.

Anyone else here running on old equipment? What’s been your experience?

[Forum Admin rokytnji]

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All my old gear like p3 and 2004 make and model are now just test gear for the team here. They are not my daily runners anymore.

My situation changed a bit when I was lucky enough to get my local city cast off computers when they upgrade their systems.
I am now the dude before it goes to the landfill.
I have 2 P4 single core desktops with low spec ram. One now freezes and the other shuts off right after I power it on.
So I replaced them with one of the city hall towers.

You can look in the hardware section of the forum to see what old gear I have installed AntiX 17 on.

Sometimes I drive a crooked road to get my mind straight.
Not all who Wander are Lost.
I'm not outa place. I'm from outer space.

Linux Registered User # 475019
How to Search for AntiX solutions to your problems

[Member cyrilus31]

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Hi bobbiecb.
I’m using an old Dell laptop (picked up from my previous job) with Pentium 4 and 2gigs of ram, not daily but at least weekly,and it’s still very useable. I can do many things in a comfortable way.
I love bringing back old gear to life.

[Member roytobin]

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Hi, bobbiecb

Welcome.
I too have a wimpy machine: 2 core Atom uP 1.6 GHz with just 1 GiB memory.
I came to AntiX in fall of 2017 because of the mepis lineage, philosophy
of lightweight, and a live iso fits on a CD.

My experience: modern web pages are ridiculous with processing and memory
requirements. Particular bad actor is music.amazon.com. Another bad
actor for me: netflix.com after log in. Some web pages spin the processor
even when quiescent, i.e. aliexpress.com and antixforum.com.
/sidetrack: Anyone know of a cloud-hosted browser virtualization company?

Since you have 1.5 GiB, you are likely OK without swap in my opinion to
browse such pages. I found firefox 59 (quantum) noticeably faster then ff
52 ESR and worth the effort to install and manually configure pulseaudio.
I find ff 59 helps on speed only, not memory consumption.

You say you “installed several browsers” to try on your p4 machine.
Please post to thread
https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/default-browser/ about your
experiences. Thanks.

roytobin

[Member bobbiecb]

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Hey, thank you all for your comments.

I am now the dude before it goes to the landfill.
. . .
I love bringing back old gear to life.

Absolutely. That’s me, too. Nothing’s more fun than geeking around with old hardware and bringing it back to life. I’ve found antiX really useful for this. I got a friend who’s got an old desktop sitting around, she’d probably throw it out but she didn’t know where to recycle it. Now it’s got linux and can serve as her backup computer. (Which is important to have since does her banking online). AntiX on the old Pentium 4 will serve the same purpose for me. Not an everday machine but ideal for a secondary computer. I’ve learned a lot by doing this.

@roytobin — thanks, I’ll post my browser results to the thread you mentioned in a week or so after I gain more experience with them. Cheers.

• This reply was modified 5 years ago by bobbiecb.

[Member Dimwit]

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I am using a AMD Duron with 496MiB memory with antiX-17.1 (Heather Heyer).
This has been the smoothest experience compared to past versions of linux.
I am talking about usefulness and speed of this old box.
Browser is what kills me. Thank god for Links 2. Seamonkey works for a couple
pages then crashes. Dillo is working but not for every page.
This has been a dependable pc for me and I just can’t give up on it.

[Member fatmac]

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I have several computers/laptops/netbooks dating between 2002 & 2010, so many that I’ve given some away, & I finally gave up on my P4 about six months ago, nothing wrong with it, just getting too slow for online. 🙂

AntiX runs on them all, unless I decide to see if any of the competition is catching up. 😉

Linux (& BSD) since 1999

[Member andfree]

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Hi, bobbiecb.
I’m running antiX for more than 2 years. I’m running it on three (about 15 years) old computers: a P4 laptop, a celeron laptop & a P4 desktop. Upgraded to 1 gb ram the first, 512 mb each one of the rest two. They are my daily runners; not just test gears. And, thanks to antiX, they are as useable and fast as I’ve never expected they could be.
In this topic, I got valuable advice that helped me to improve more their performance.
I also found a lot of useful tips here.

[Member sleekmason]

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My daily everything is a dual-core with 2 gigs of ram. With a rebuilt kernel, everything runs like lightning here. Video editing, browser, rox-filer and terminals all open at the same time with little lag. I use Palemoon browser and am quite happy with it. Opens in a couple of seconds with nothing else open, or about 8 seconds with editing going on. (yeah yeah, these are approximations:)
–
CPU: Dual Core Pentium T4300 (-MCP-) speed/min/max: 1591/1200/2100 MHz
Kernel: 4.17.0-rc18 x86_64 Up: 17h 28m Mem: 373.5/1956.3 MiB (19.1%)
HDD: 149.05 GiB (23.2% used) Procs: 105
Processes: 105 Uptime: 17h 29m Memory: 1.91 GiB used: 358.3 MiB (18.3%)

[Member mowest]

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You are able to do video editing with 2gigs of ram? I’m amazed by this. Which video editor do you use and did you install it from the Debian Stable repos? Do you run with an SSD hard drive where you have AntiX installed? I have a similar spec old laptop, that I clearly need to push a little harder.

[Member sleekmason]

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Which video editor do you use and did you install it from the Debian Stable repos?

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Well, I don’t rightly know what qualifies, but I use ffmpeg to create dvd’s, and Avidemux for editing out parts of videos and adding music. With these, I also use a browser, rox-filer, and a terminal or 4(urxvt), open at the same time. This is also true during kernel compiles.
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I also checked during a kernel compile after writing the above, and it takes 9 seconds to open Palemoon Browser. Next time I am running avidemux I’ll check that time too, but really haven’t noticed differences to any major degree because they ALL ramp out the CPU, and all seem to run around 700-1100MB (from memory) when used together with the rest, and I don’t generally open more than three tabs at a time in Palemoon. My swappiness is currently set to 5 and the cache pressure to 50.
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Here are all stuff I do, per your request for download information on the programs I am using. I hope they may be useful to you.
All activities in the following links have some part that is labor intensive.
–
https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/kernels-make-your-own/
https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/slow-and-fast-motion-video-using-ffpmeg-with-music-options/
https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/google-photos-and-more/
https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/how-to-create-a-dvd-from-the-command-line/
–
–
I don’t know how much my multitasking is due to the BFQ Scheduler or not, I did the switch and haven’t looked back. Works well for me. Link if your interested. https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/how-to-use-the-bfq-io-scheduler/
–
–
I fully take into account there may be some production suite common for editing but I don’t use anything like that.

• This reply was modified 5 years ago by sleekmason.

[Member seaken64]

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Hi bobbiecb,

I have antiX-14 installed on a Pentium-III 600Mhz, antiX-16 and antiX-17 on a P-III 1000Mhz, and antiX-17 on a P4/Celeron M 1.4Ghz and an Atom 1.6Ghz.

They all work great, I don’t use any of these as my daily driver. I maintain the P-III 1000Mhz just to see how long it can be survive. That box used to be my main Win2000 desktop so it has some sentimental value, Just for fun.

I use MX-17 on my main laptop in my living room. I use it when watching TV. That box is a Thinkpad Core-2-Duo at 1.4Ghz. That works so well I just installed MX-17 on my main desktop in my office/lab dual-booting with Win7. That is also a Core-2-Duo at about 2.4 Ghz with 2Gb Ram.

Most people would classify all of these as “old” computers. But I have several 8088, 80286, 80386, 80486, and Pentiums. Now those are old! No Linux on any of them. But antiX is great on P-III and P-4.

Welcome.
Sean

[Member PPC]

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I’ve similar hardware to a couple of guys that already posted here:
My office work pc is a netbook with atom 1666 mhz cpu, no dedicated graphics board, 1 gig ram, with swap. It has antiX 16.2 installed to hd and a live usb 17.1 with persistence. It’s plugged to a external monitor, keyboard and mouse (so it serves as a very silent destop- no fan noise at all). I work on-line and most of the time I use firefox ESR (low memory consumption) but also palemoon and the latest firefox version I manually installed (quantum feels faster, but uses more ram than FF ESR). The main problem with browsing is that it takes about 10 seconds to open firefox (almost no difference If I’m running from the installed or live OS- that sure tells me how slow my hd is…), I can’t have many open tabs because of ram restrictions. Despite these restrictions it’s a great, reliable and fluid to use, office pc.
At home I have a Pentium +/- 1800 mhz desktop, 1 gig ram, with antiX 16,2 installed, with a old nvidia card. I never figured out why, dispite multiple trying multiple configurations, streaming video on the browser (youtube) is always more fluid on my netbook than on my nvidia powered desktop. But using mpv I can view hd streaming video just fine on my desktop…

I belive most antiX users have older hardware. If this OS makes hardware that’s more than 10 years old usable, it’s sure to fly on newer machines. It lakes the eye candy most OS have. For that you can use MX linux (kind of antiX cousin, XFCE based distro) or any other distro like Ubuntu, Debian, etc, etc. The more eye candy the OS has, the more resources it demands… SO, I’m sticking with antiX, even if I’m able to upgrade one of my machines.

[Forum Admin rokytnji]

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t lakes the eye candy most OS have.

My autistic grandson likes his eye candy.

But that runs on a Dell e5510 with dual cores and 4 gig of ram that I surprised him with.

His brother and sister will end up with my older 9 inch intel Atom touchscreen antix netbooks. With easy to use passive touchscreens and pens included.

• This reply was modified 5 years ago by rokytnji.

Sometimes I drive a crooked road to get my mind straight.
Not all who Wander are Lost.
I'm not outa place. I'm from outer space.

Linux Registered User # 475019
How to Search for AntiX solutions to your problems

[Member PPC]

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rokytnji: I believe that the “eye candy” part of my post was probably not as clear as it should have been. By that I meant flashy windows animations and stuff like that (I used to have wobbly windows on linux mint, a long time ago, my wife, used to MS windows, loved that). Any desktop with a good wallpaper and bar/dock will probably look appealing. 🙂 I’m glad your grand kid enjoys his system (I wish mine had 4 gig of ram)!
I tried some of the optional desktops that come with antiX, but I ended up with the default one, without any desktop image, because I’m not that into the OS looks, but more into the way it reacts to the user. I even ran a live session and tried installing xfce and configuring it’s bar so it would look almost like a recent windows system, but it too much of my precious ram, so I kept the default desktop because I’m too used to desktop icons (I’ve been using pc’s since windows 3.1, so I’m still too “formated” to click an icon instead of looking for it in the menu or using the cli. Fluxbox is probably the antiX desktop with the best looking bar, but the inability to easily put a start menu on the bar made me stay away from it, once again, I’m too used to that after decades using OS that way…

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