Ultimate Edition 3.4 Lite LTS Questions

[Micro]

I have no doubt that Lite will run fine on your device. I would reccommend these standards as the old swap rules are outdated as ram was expensive and hard drive speeds were slow back then. Here are the standards I use on all types of disks except SSD's:
32 bit OS with 4GB RAM or less = 2048 Swap
32 bit OS with more than 4GB RAM = 1024 Swap
64 bit OS with 4GB RAM or less =1024 Swap
64 bit OS with more than 4GB RAM =512 Swap or less, but never below 32mb

[pam]

try lubuntu 12.04 or 10.04 if you want a stringent, secure and up to date system. Smart thing since you could just install the latest browser/s with up-to date security versus using an archaic distro with unresolvable dependencies.

Debian 4 may work like a galloping horse, but im unaware of its current state.....i had tried it on a pentium 3 with 458 megs sd-ram.

Ultimate Edition 3.4 lite might still be pretty heavy for your system and because of mate desktop environment...Lxde or Xfce might splice through if could install them.

Still nothing beats puppy and its runs off ram too...

Driver Experiment

[Driver]

So no, it's not happening there, but that's to be expected. I have ran 2.6, 2.8, 3.0 Gamers, on it. Still, that PC sucked when it was new. Kind of disappointed really, I want to install 3.4 lite somewhere.

Oh. Sorry, I should have read that message before I wished you luck when I quoted your previous one.

Hey, if you have the time, the bandwidth, the blank DVD, and don't mind, would you by chance want to download and try installing Mint 14 Xfce? Seems to be a great blend of new components and low resource usage (CPU and RAM). Not sure how well it'd run on you old computer, but it runs on all three of the ones that are here (with varying degrees of "well," admittedly (lol). But it doesn't appear to place any of the CPUs into maximum burn, idles with less than 200 megs of memory usage, and I haven't seen it use more than (I think) 645 loaded down with running apps. I can't say whether you'd like it or not, of course, but I'd be interested to read your report about how well (or not) it actually runs on your system. I'm starting to strongly suspect that - on the setups here - the limiting factor is more the graphics setups than anything else, and I have the feeling that if I could get the nVidia 173 (.36) driver sorted on the desktop and get, well, any driver sorted out on the loaner laptop, they'd both perform much better. Mint is no Ultimate Edition. Whether you consider it better, worse, or just a little different (as I do) is up to you. But it is Ubuntu-based, so it ought to be familiar in operation. And the newer Xfce (I ended up adding the PPAs to make it the "newest," which brought some improvements) strikes me as being oddly more GNOME 2.x-like than their MATE, yet still its own (mature) desktop environment at the same time. I wouldn't call it the poor man's DE, lol, but Xfce does seem to run pretty good (depending on the hardware specs, like always) on poor people's hardware . I've never been a distro-hopper, but I seem to like the newest Mint Xfce and Ultimate Edition (all of them, lol) more-or-less equally. I end up adding some things to Mint and removing some from Ultimate Edition; I never cared for green, but I don't have to screw with the settings in order to read the text in boxes, lol... IOW, they both have things that appeal to me. I'm really liking Xfce, though, even better than "old GNOME," which I never expected to happen. I'll definitely be inclined to add it to any Ultimate Edition that I run in the future (if it's not one that already includes it).

Thanks (to everyone) for your help and advice, now and in the future,
Driver

[Driver]

I have no doubt that Lite will run fine on your device. I would reccommend these standards as the old swap rules are outdated as ram was expensive and hard drive speeds were slow back then. Here are the standards I use on all types of disks except SSD's:
32 bit OS with 4GB RAM or less = 2048 Swap
32 bit OS with more than 4GB RAM = 1024 Swap
64 bit OS with 4GB RAM or less =1024 Swap
64 bit OS with more than 4GB RAM =512 Swap or less, but never below 32mb

Interesting. I have a gig of ram on my laptop and either that or 1280 on the desktop, have always gone with 1.5x for swap, and have rarely seen even 100 megs of swap actually used (although of course it might have been higher and I just didn't notice). When it did use more, it used pretty much all of it, but that was due to runaway browser scripts.

I've wondered what would actually happen if I ran out of memory (physical + swap). Would I screw up the OS? Would it crash, but be fine after a reboot? Or would it just be like when I run completely out of hard drive space, give me some kind of error but keep on trucking, lol? (Every hard drive in the house wouldn't make one good one as far as capacity is concerned - or one fast one, if they were set up in a RAID configuration, for that matter - so I end up with 0 space free a lot.)

Oh, and I've read that with more than 4 gigs, one might be able to do away with swap entirely. Although I tend to use the hibernate function from time to time, so I would still have a swap partition, regardless.

[Micro]

I would only negate swap if on SSD and the OS will not use a virtual software like Vbox or VMware Workstation. Yes the 1.5-2x RAM rule doesn't apply anymore. The OS would become non responsive and a reboot would fix it np. Bleachbit has an option to clear swap As far as RAID goes it would be wise to set up swap on each disk outside the raid volume. ex on RAID 1 with 2 80GB Drives:
RAID volume group1 (78.5GB)
/root with /home or just /
Drive 1
sda1 /boot 512mb
sda2 linux swap 512mb
Drive 2
sdb1 linux swap 512mb

[Driver]

try lubuntu 12.04 or 10.04 if you want a stringent, secure and up to date system. Smart thing since you could just install the latest browser/s with up-to date security versus using an archaic distro with unresolvable dependencies.

Never got that warm and fuzzy feeling with any Ubuntu that I've tried, if you know what I mean. Nothing against it, it just hasn't been for me. Edubuntu, maybe - doesn't it use Xfce instead of Gnome3, Unity, cellphone DE, or any of the other various DEs? I can't remember offhand. The time I tried LXDE it seemed a little too light for my tastes. Still, one will do what one must, lol.

Debian 4 may work like a galloping horse, but im unaware of its current state.....i had tried it on a pentium 3 with 458 megs sd-ram.

That's impressive. I knew there were more than a few old computers around, still. And I had always assumed that a lot of them were running some form of linux (even though I keep reading that linux users run new, fast, powerful rigs), because I figured the kind of person who is likely to actually find a use for an old computer is probably intelligent, creative, and "techy." IDK how true any of that is, but that's my guess.

I actually didn't even know about Debian until after I found Ultimate Edition (2.3, at the time) one day, installed it for whatever reason, and thought, "Wow, why didn't someone tell me about this sooner? " Previous to that, my only linux experience was with Mandrake 8.1. I read about and ordered their Powerpack Edition, which came with a period of support, and sounded great. Due to an issue right after registering for said support - I lost both that password and the password for the email account I used to register - I ended up not getting any support and nothing I could think of, including offering to mail them the box and the covers to both manuals that came with it, would get them to give me the support (which wouldn't have been much, I'm sure, but it was the reason I bought the package in the first place, so...), and that experience soured me on linux for several years. Luckily, I found Ultimate Edition. Then I read about Ubuntu, saw that - at the time, at least - their distros fit on CDs, which I had, so I downloaded and tried them too, but never cared for. I read about Debian at about that point in time, but read that their stable branch was "old," and compared to my Ultimate Edition experience, "old" sounded, well, [i]old[/ii]. And their unstable (testing? I can't remember) branch, I had read that occasionally it could be quite unstable, indeed . So I never ended up trying it. Maybe some time in the near future might be a good time to do so.

Ultimate Edition 3.4 lite might still be pretty heavy for your system and because of mate desktop environment...Lxde or Xfce might splice through if could install them.

You may well be correct. Nothing against Ultimate Edition - I really like it - but even though I found the older versions ran fine on my computers (at the time, at least), I always thought they would be happier given room to run. And that someone like me, still pretty ignorant (but s l o w l y learning a thing here and there - just not, apparently, where graphics configurations are concerned, lol) and with lesser hardware, might be better off with a barebones setup that I could add what I really needed to, as opposed to a setup that had it all and trying to remove bits and pieces that I felt that I really didn't need. Seems safer (theoritically, at least).

Example: I installed Ultimate 2.7 last night before laying down and trying to sleep a little. IIRC, ram usage was closer to 400 megs than the <200 that I had been seeing with Mint/Xfce. "No problem," I thought, "I'll just remove some of the things that I know I either have no use for or can do without." I popped open the applet that shows the resources (memory, cpu, swap) in one tab and the running processes in another. Bluetooth only used 1.5 meg or so, but none of my devices have Bluetooth, so I killed that. Yarssr, while something that I use, isn't important, and it was almost 20 megs I think, so I kiiled that. Gnome Do... That one has always annoyed me; one both 2.6 and 2.7, whenever I booted into the desktop, that SoB would push my CPU to 100% and hold it there for some time, and it uses a big chunk of ram. It pops up at every boot, I have to press Escape to get it to go away (and it's still running), and if I don't wait until the CPU usage drops before doing so, the CPU stays pegged half the time even after I kill the thing (not sure why?). So... Bang, it was dead, too, lol. There went around 40 megs, or ~10% of used memory. "Nice," I thought, "I'll leave Yarssr so that I have the ability to use it at each boot and then kill it manually, but Bluetooth and Gnome Do (the entire concept of which I find invasive, unnecessary, and unwanted and would kill even if it only used a meg or two) have got to go, so I'll uninstall them." I ran Synaptic Package Manager, clicked on the thing to display only installed components, and typed bluetooth into the search box. I saw a short list of Bluetooth-related files, selected them all, and tried to mark them for complete removal. Turns out, that would have taken something that seemed necessary (Network something or other, I believe?). So I canceled that. Then I did the same thing with Gnome Do and I'm pretty sure that one of the things IT wanted to remove was called "Ultimate Edition." That... I think Ultimate Edition probably requires Ultimate Edition . So I failed to remove either of those things.

Still nothing beats puppy and its runs off ram too...

I considered that (and have not completely ruled it out). But there's light... and then there's flyweight. Still, it is said to run on older computers. Although, if it runs in RAM like a live distro (I guess that's what it is, albeit with a really neat form of persistence, being able to save changes to a CD or DVD every time you do a shutdown), wouldn't that severely limit an already limited amount of memory? And then there's the question of websites: I found both a puppylinux . org and a puppylinux . com. I looked at links on each page and neither seems to acknowledge - or link to - the other. Are they separate entities? Is one correct/official and the other a knockoff? Some kind of phishing site or other scam (perhaps offering an "adulterated" OS that'll phone home with my information)? Seems unlikely, but... So I've been a little leery of it.

As far as nothing beating it, if you are speaking in terms of resource requirements, there is always browserlinux . com, lol - current version is 93 megs. It includes Firefox and, err, Firefox. (Actually, I think it also includes a music player and Flash.) I have an old 128meg flash drive that came with some free-to-air satellite receiver or other that I got once when I was into that hobby, it would fit on that. It would, I assume, allow me to surf the Interwebs, possibly. If there was room for FBReader and a few selected eBooks (I'm a heavy reader, but cannot see well enough for regular-print books and some days, like Mom, I have trouble holding a book for more than a few minutes at a time, but eBooks don't need to be held and the font size is adjustable, win:win) and possibly an email client, I'd be able to survive. I could even drop the email client if needs must and use <YUCK!> webmail. Only... Neither my desktop nor the loaner laptop have the ability to boot from a USB device. Curses, foiled again, lol. But it seems like something to keep in mind for a portable/secure (as in, nothing on the host's hard drive) web browsing experience. And it got me to thinking, would it be possible to create a "pure" eBook reader "OS?" I've got lots of eBooks and in the Winter when I have no work, no (paid) entertainment, and precious little else, I can easily read a book each day. I recently learned that I could request a free DVD from Project Gutenberg. They're basically public-domain titles, meaning old, meaning I've already read a lot of them, but the DVD's label states "29,000+ books," so I haven't read even a fraction of a percent of them .

Rambling. The usual couple of hours of sleep doesn't seem to help much when you've got the flu, I guess. I think I should get back inside, try to eat something today, and then crawl back under the covers for a while. Y'all have a great day!

Driver Experiment

Maybe I should have titled this thread something like "Options for Broken Down, Old Computers?" Or... "Driver is Driving Everyone Crazy Again!"

Actually, maybe I should have requested that this thread end up in a forum that is more general in nature. I originally meant to just ask about Ultimate Edition 3.4 Lite, specifically. But then... Well, it seemed silly to create a separate thread for each OS/question. I don't know what would have been best. I did get it moved out of the "Post your 3.4 screenshots here" thread. Wasn't sure how I managed to post in there in the first place, but then I saw that the title of that thread (in the thread list) was somewhat different and didn't mention posting screenshots at all. <SHRUGS> Go figure. Hmm... Rambling, again. I'll just press this button now, shall I?

[Driver]

I would only negate swap if on SSD and the OS will not use a virtual software like Vbox or VMware Workstation. Yes the 1.5-2x RAM rule doesn't apply anymore. The OS would become non responsive and a reboot would fix it np. Bleachbit has an option to clear swap As far as RAID goes it would be wise to set up swap on each disk outside the raid volume. ex on RAID 1 with 2 80GB Drives:
RAID volume group1 (78.5GB)
/root with /home or just /
Drive 1
sda1 /boot 512mb
sda2 linux swap 512mb
Drive 2
sdb1 linux swap 512mb

WAAAAAAAAY over my head - so I'm going to bed.

No virtual machines here (although my computers are virtually computers). But feel free to post things like that - assuming the rules allow it in threads like this - because I am in no way opposed to trying to learn something new. I try to do so every day. On a good day, I can get it in before noon - that way, I can coast through the rest of the day, lol.

Seriously, though, seems like I read a thread here once - or at "Oz" - where the person mentioned doing without swap altogether and tricks such as, when installing the OS, issuing a command to load the entire installation .ISO into RAM, which was supposed to make the installation fly by (probably at warp factor 11 if they also happened to have one of those hyper-fast SSDs?). But I think they probably had a fair amount more than "just" 4 gigs (which is more RAM than every computer in the house AND the two or three "orphan sticks" I've got that won't plug into any of these computers (unfortunately).

Take care and keep up the knowledge giving,
Driver

[Micro]

Beware of anyone with a Defcon or Blackhat Avatar... You can also adjust how much your kernel swaps in /etc/sysctl.conf (swappiness). But all in all you'll be fine with 1GB swap running Lite. MATE is lightweight and will do the job. Enabling compiz and such is where the you get into increasing the machines load and if you dont care about stuff like that you'll be fine... Plus you can always uninstall software to slim down the OS. Either way good luck and we are here to help...

[pam]

In my experience Mandrake Linux 10.1 was the best operating system ever, on this planet. RIP

I dont think there is any definition for using swap, use lots if you have lots of disk space, if not, the usual like you mentioned..

Like Micro said you need to disable compiz on Ultimate Edition 3.4 lite....maybe download a lightweight compositor for rendering like xcompmgr.

Plus you can always uninstall software to slim down the OS.

yup, a Must do.

Install lite, see if you get a desktop, then we'll chug along..

Take care of that flu.