[WBEL-devel] finally installed RC2 last night

[Hedemark, Magnus]

Daniel Robitaille [mailto:whitebox@robitaille.fastmail.fm] said:

> that machine has been happily running RedHat8 and 9 for quite 
> a while in
> a desktop configuration  (i.e  mostly web surfing/e-mail) 
> WBEL seems to
> close to RHL9 speed-wise after 24 hours of tests (which is not
> surprising since they are relatively close application-version-wise).

We've been running RHL 9 in production for awhile so I've got a good feel
for it and, I agree, WBEL/RHEL feels very much like RHL 9 in most respects.

> The trick is not to be greedy and turn off any services not 
> needed, not
> to use KDE but Gnome without any bells and whistles, and try to stay
> clear of big application like OpenOffice as much as possible (but it
> will run it; it just take a long while to start it up). 

OOo takes a long time to start up on a dual 3.0GHz Xeon (not spreading
FUD... this is from recent personal experience)

Stripping down your system to the essentials is a good approach to take
regardless of the system size, but of course the savings become more
pronounced on older hardware.

Anyone who is thinking of doing this should take a good look at the
chkconfig command.  It's an easy one to learn and will put a big dent in
your diet plan.

> And that what makes WBEL appealing for these type of older computers:
> WBEL is probably going to be the last OS this particular hardware will
> see before it dies. With a ~5 years estimated EOL, the hardware will
> most probably not outlast the OS. 

You obviously haven't seen my home lab.
http://trilug.org/~chrish/museum/

That page is outdated.  The collection has changed a bit since then.  And it
doesn't really reflect the collection of PC's ranging from Pentium 60 to
Pentium 133.

> And using WBEL will avoid forced
> upgrades from other Linus distro that will make the machine 
> become less
> and less usable for the users due to continous addition of new
> memory/cpu-expensive features.

While I don't think it would be wise at all to condone changing the packages
to suit lower end hardware, I do think it would be valuable to document
specific steps taken to get WBEL to run on lower end hardware.  I know of
some charity groups in Philadelphia who are looking at Linux and may very
well decide to use WBEL on older hardware if they knew how to slim it down
some.