Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3104 mails)

[rachel.greenham@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Rachel Greenham)]

Damon Register wrote:
> 
> Jerry and June Kreps wrote:
> > Ah!  Another one!  I became M$ free last weekend!  Feeelllls Gooood!!!
> must be nice.  I just got SuSE 6.4 and have found it to be a major
> improvement over previous versions, still it has a ways to go.
> I discovered that YaST2 choked on 32 MB RAM while Windows 95 installed
> on an old 386 16MHz with only 8MB RAM.  Last night just for fun I tried
> Windows 98-2 Internet Connection Sharing with Netmeeting and found
> it worked just fine, something which has to this day not been solved
> in the Linux world (except commercially or with old 2.0.x kernels).
> 
> Please don't take this as flame bait.  I really want to see Linux
> succeed.  I just hate to spend so much time fixing problems found
> in Linux

No, it's a fair point. Much is made about how Linux can run in a smaller
footprint than Windows, and I can see how your experience would seem to show
otherwise.

It's fair to say that SuSE is a "big" distribution - the standard install is
quite big and memory-intensive. No single distribution can meet all needs,
and SuSE is aimed at modern mid-to-high-end desktop and server installations
and should have few problems on any PC you can buy new now. You can set SuSE
up to be light and tight, but that's not how it comes out of the box. At
64Mb and above there's no problem. 32Mb should also be generally fine - my
partner for instance runs SuSE 6.3 with KDE quite happily on a 24Mb P90 old
Compaq laptop, but running Netscape on top of that slows it to a crawl.
We've pretty much given up trying to put SuSE on the old PS/2-55 we have -
the default kernel on the installation floppies is compiled for i486 or
Pentium IIRC - but Slackware should go on it just fine or one of the other
distributions that cater for small/legacy hardware. It's true that Linux
will run on some astonishingly small hardware, but there are sacrifices
along the way. SuSE defaults to using KDE, which, while being a nice desktop
environment, is a bit heavy on system usage, as is X itself of course.


-- 
Rachel

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