In case you were wondering, or even if you weren’t, I should mention that the 150Mhz Mebius is still the brains behind this operation.
And although I sometimes flip-flop between distros for it, the chief contender at this juncture is still ConnochaetOS.
During my Extremely Busy Time a week or so ago, I briefly returned to the Crux installation I had in place as recently as March.
But that unfortunately relies on Xorg to do most of the dirty work, and on a machine this slow, I have no faith in X and company.
ConnochaetOS inherits a lot of Arch Linux’s demeanor, and using only the framebuffer (which it can automatically configure to 800×600 on this confounded Trident video card, even when I can’t do it myself šæ ) makes this machine a very impressive performer.
By default ConnochaetOS installs a graphical environment, and that means you’ll have to strip out a lot of the stuff that comes in the 0.8.9 beta 2 ISO.
It’s worth the effort though, because the resulting system, spared of the trappings and dead weight of Xorg, takes up much less space on the hard drive and much less space in memory.
It’s not perfect of course. Sound is sometimes sketchy, but it’s sketchy in my custom systems too. Sometimes the bell rings when someone sends a message in centerim, and sometimes it doesn’t. š
But it admits a little more flexibility, hardware-wise, than the custom systems I have built. And there’s the benefit of being lazy, and letting someone else handle the hard work of updating core software. š
That’s nice, even I have to build and maintain the other 90 percent of the software I use, because it’s not in the conventional repos.
Luckily Arch, and by extension ConnochaetOS, has some remarkable tools just for that. Hello, PKGBUILDs.
All things considered, I like using this a lot more than some of the other systems I’ve tried at this speed. Debian won’t boot, Crux is more high-maintenance than I want right now … this one is just right.
If you’re also trapped in the i586 bracket, I wholeheartedly recommend it. Even as I did six months ago. … š
I installed ConnochaetOS juste few days back, since my regular job is pushing my limits, i did not had a chance to be properly introduced to this OS.
But on first look it does run damn fast, even with icewm default.
Will try to do some tweaking on it this weekend to see what will come out of it.