Which version of Linux are you using?

Very sad to see the state of Bodhi these days. PCLos really is a good distro, polished all around but the regular install does have too much bloat. I too prefer the minime, but in KDE.

 

Currently I'm using Mint.

 

My CF-29 Toughbook is dual booted, running XP ( still have a few programs that need it ) and Linux Mint 13.

 

Ubuntu on my desktop and my X200MA

 

Using Linux Mint Debian on my cheaply acquired ThinkPad R61e. Pleasantly surprised with the low memory usage and runs pretty smooth so happy with the result.

 

Ubuntu on the desktop at work.

 

Coming off two years of being a Network Admin at a University, most of the server VMs there are CentOS. For a desktop on my Latitude E6510, which needn't be so ultralight, Mint 17 Cinnamon, which supports the hardware beautifully. For personal VMs I run CrunchBang. I learned the basics of *nix on Slackware.

 

My ThinkPad laptop = Arch
Server = Arch
Mum's laptop = Ubuntu 14.04
GF's laptop = Mint 17 Mate (I wish I could change it to the new Ubuntu Mate 14.04, but she won't let me...)

 

Technically the answer is "Linux LinsArch 3.17.2-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Thu Oct 30 20:49:39 CET 2014 x86_64 GNU/Linux".

In terms of distro, mostly Arch plus a few Debian installs on laptops and desktops. Server-type devices are mostly on Debian. The HPC environment my company uses appears to be something modified from the Red Hat family.

Don't see many Arch servers in the wild. Do you time travel back for a certain amount of delay or simply do security updates manually when you're aware of a specific problem?

 

Well, I see them not that infrequently. Here's some reasons why.

My headless Arch server (on RaspberryPI) runs:
- several btsyncs, mostly for bakcup purposes for my laptops and mobile phones
- LEMP with several domains
- rtorrent+rutorrent, ownCloud
- CUPS, sane, etc, etc

and its memory usage peaks at 180MB.

I do full system updates at various frequencies - sometimes daily, sometimes weekly, sometimes fortnightly. Never have I had any screwup resulting from an update. In fact, one Nginx update fixed one thing that was not working for me.
But if any problems occur (or if I screw up some config file), I always have BTRFS snapshots which I can restore in seconds.

 

Gentoo on laptop and desktop.

Couple things I like about Gentoo: 1) The only processes/apps on the system/running are one's I put there. 2) For the most part there isn't a concept of "version"; you are always just updating packages/kernel to a newer version. This is opposed to my experience with Ubuntu where you can't get the newest version of X browser or app unless you "upgrade" to a newer Ubuntu version.

Couple things I don't like: 1) Compiling some apps can take ages (Chromium for example). 2) It's a fairly manual process to get things like special function buttons or sleep working on a laptop. You have to do more investigation and fiddling to get those kinds of things working)

AN

 

@abbey_normal, try Arch. You keep the things you like and get rid of those you don't like.

 

@Impactor Thanks! I might do that.

Think I tried it once. Can't remember why I didn't stick with it. Looks like it has the same concept of rolling updates as Gentoo but has binary packages instead of (mostly) source builds of Gentoo.

AN

 

On my older HP DV5000 running Linux Mint 17 Qiana-Cinnamon,,just upgraded Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca-Cinnamon from within LM 17 and then upgraded the kernel to the recommended Kernel for LM 17.1.


Cheers
3Fees

HP Pavilion 17" AMD Elite A10-5750M-8750G-APU,Micron-Crucial Ballistix Sport- 16GB DDR3L- 1866Mhz with automatic Over/Under Clocking of DDR3 Ram by the AMD APU-1866 MHz Memory Controller-Built in the APU Architecture, Samsung Evo 250GB SSD,Logitec LS1- Laser Mouse 5000 DPI, Seagate Backup Plus USB 3.0 drive -1TB size, Windows 8.1 Full Retail Box Version, 64 Bit installed. I have Lexar S33 32GB USB 3 Jump Drive ~ 100/50 MB/s.

 

Restored my in-laws 2008 Vaio SZ330p (2gb RAM, T7200 Core 2 Duo) by tearing it down and installing a new fan, and decided to try out Linux Mint xfce. Loved it! Worked better than Lubuntu and Linux Mint 17 (Cinnamon) out of the box, and I was able to get decent flash performance and consistent suspend/hibernate unlike the other two.

I am getting a T61 with 4:3 screen and will be upgrading it with a T9300 + Intel G2 SSD using Middleton's BIOS. This time I'll be using 64bit Xubuntu to compare it to Mint xfce. We'll see which lightweight Linux distro wins out in the end.

 

elementaryOS. By far the best distro I've used so far.

 

I've got to make a mental note to myself to test that one out, since I've heard many good things about it.

 

For me, it's the first distro I've used that hasn't ever felt like it was fighting me, interface-wise. It's not trying to 'revolutionize the desktop' with some odd new interface. It's fairly traditional, and very intuitive. It's also very light on resources.

 

What's so special about the interface? It's not like they developed a new DE or something.

 

I have it in a few VMs I use. It's pretty, for sure. I certainly like it, almost as much as I like Mint (though I like Mint's desktop better). My only complaint about elementaryOS is the Applications menu, which is more like a smartphone's interface than a traditional Start Menu type of interface.

 

Looks like OSX wannabee .

 

Maybe becuase of the dock? It doesn't feel like OSX to me, I've used both.

Mr.Koala,

Yes, they did. It's called Pantheon.

 

Music player looks really iTunes-like. And overall it looks similar to OSX. At least from watching that promo video on their website.

 

Arr. I just thought I got glimpses of many thing and assumed this distro placed them together. Sorry for jumping to conclusions.

 

No problem.

Maybe, but to me it feels very Linuxy. I use it for development mostly, so I spend 90% of my time in either Sublime, Chrome, or the terminal. What I like is that it's light, gets out of my way, and when I do venture out of that 90% for something else, I don't have to fight the UI for it.

When I used OSX I felt like there were multiple annoying things, but it's been a while.

 

So I downloaded the 32-bit version of Elementary OS and burned a disk...

The machine that I intended to test this distro on will NOT play nice with it at all. Freezes at various points and never fully boots the CD.

Is a P4M system too old for something like this? No clue.

Here's what I do know, though:

a) The laptop in question runs CentOS with no problems whatsoever and boots a plethora of "light" distros from the CD/DVD.

b) The media itself is fine since it booted with zero issues on two of my slightly newer (PM and C2D) systems.

So, the interaction between the two is where the failure stands...somewhere...

As for the OS itself, I found it likeable and easy to navigate. Will have to play with it a bit more to be able to actually state something with any weight, though.

 

my first guess is the Kernel. maybe you need to try one without PAE??

 

That may very well be the case, since it's the only non-PAE machine in my household. However, I was under the impression that a PAE kernel wouldn't boot at all, as in that the machine wouldn't do anything...

Will do some research and report back...

 

I run the rolling / long term support releases on my desktops and the shorter lifespan releases that I experiment with on my flash drive. Presently running:

1) Main desktop with 4 hard drives:
Centos 7 (Installed yesterday)
Centos 6.6 (Installed since 6.0 was released)
Linux Mint Debian (Installed since its very first release. Now at Update Pack 8)
Windows 7 (How did that get in here)

2) On a second old Pentium computer:
Also Linux Mint Debian.

3) Live versions on my super speedy Sandisk Extreme 16GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive (Mostly used to test and/or fix computers):
Fedora-Live-KDE-i686-20-1 (EDIT: Updated to version 21 today)
kali-linux-1.0.8-i386 (EDIT: Updated to version 1.0.9a today)
linuxmint-17-kde-dvd-32bit (EDIT: Updated to version 17.1 today)
lubuntu-14.04-desktop-i386 (EDIT: Updated to version 14.10 today)
puppy precise-5.7.1
puppy precise-5.7.1-retro
puppy racy-5.5
puppy slacko-5.7.0-PAE
puppy slacko-5.7-NO-pae
puppy wary-5.5
CentOS-7.0-1406-x86_64-KdeLive
Also included are Hiren's boot cd, UBCD and the Kapersky rescue disk.

 

Fedora 21 on a Haswell Dell XPS 15
Manjaro on an Gigabyte i5 NUC -- this may be my preferred dev OS in the future: stable, up-to-date tools, and love the rolling release!
Kubuntu on an older Dell E6400

 

Its been well over 8 years since I dabbled in PC linux distros. We had a "old" 13" Dell laptop being discarded from work though and I figured it would make a good candidate for Linux. Runs a decent c2d (9400) with 4 gigs of ram and a 300g HD. Anyways I made a bootable Ubuntu LTS usb and gave it a shot.

Gota say I am amazed at how far linux has come since I dabbled. Everything works! No fiddling with wireless or graphic drivers (granted it is a intel integrated gpu). Anyhow getting used to the GUI, feels a little awkward coming from W7 but its not bad.

This is my school/backup laptop now so we will see how things hold up

 

I would like to put some Linux distro on severely downgraded 5930G in my signature. Please recommend me one.

The main criteria is it should run with 1GB RAM and no swap flawlessly. So far I tried installing elementaryOS and succeeded, however, I don't like it at all.

Moreover that, I have problems with speakers - their configuration should be altered, but I can't find proper documentation on how to do it in elementaryOS, basically most documentation I find is not helping at all. It will sound terribly funny, but when I google "how to open terminal in elementary OS" or "elementary OS keyboard shortcuts" or similar I get anything... except for instuction on how to open the damn terminal!

So, tired as hell after this penguin torture, sleep I go - without this indispensable knowledge. Will continue tomorrow, though - with different distro. Have no other Linux experience but Maemo, just in case. So, after you stopped laughing on this one (I bet you'll do... sooner or later), please do not hesitate to advise me on the subject.

 

No swap, huh? May I ask why?

Try Peppermint. I use it to test older machines that are low on RAM and/or missing hard drives.

 

Linux doesn't like running without any swap, especially with that little RAM. I personally run with swap equal to my RAM but with swappiness set to 0 (vm.swappiness=0 in sysctl.conf) so it will only swap if absolutely necessary.

I currently have Debian Jessie running on my HP dm1-4170us (i3 2367m, integrated graphics, 4GB RAM). I installed the Xfce desktop environment from a command line install. I kind of made a "xubuntu lite" using the greybird theme and elementary icons. I have a Yoga 3 14 on order but I will likely need to go with something like Ubuntu 15.04 for the newer kernel for hardware support, but we'll see what I end up with.

 

ajkula66, my experience shows that swap+mechanical hdd (and SSHD as well) leads to ridiculous sluggishness of certain operations. I first installed ElementaryOS with 2GB swap partition for experiment's sake - and it was unbearable, opening some settings took tens of seconds.

raptir, thank you for advice about swappinness, I will definitely follow it.

 

With 1GB of RAM I would really try for something fairly minimal. Maybe Debian built from CLI with lxde. I would also avoid heavyweight browsers like Firefox or Chrome and maybe opt for Midori.

 

Crunchbang, Peppermint, Lubuntu, or Bodhi (new Bodhi 3.0 should be out this month!!). also you could try Simplicity (the new 15.1 just came out!).

Don't forget to check out Distrowatch.com for information.

 

Linux Mint 17.1



Cheers
3Fees

 

Settled down for Lubuntu eventually. First distro of those I installed that recognizes brightness keys properly. Set swappiness to 10, manually configured DPI scaling. Subwoofer still ain't working, and my last attempt to fix it messed up the whole sound subsystem, had to reinstall the OS. Solutions I found yet don't work at all. =\ Not that it's critical, though. What is more important - Lubuntu is fast enough on this notebook, and indeed light on memory.

Some additional thoughts on the subject - of distros I tried, Kali made the best impression. It was an overkill for home use and thus required some reconfiguration, but was also easiest and fastest to install and very intuitive to run. Oh, and it was extremely hard to resist the temptation of simply buying a 2GB RAM stick and installing Windows. Basically, if I didn't sell my 4GB memory module prior to all this, I don't think I'd have enough willpower and interest even to try Linux on this laptop, being aware it has problems running it. =)

Update: bought one more 1GB DDR2 stick and installed Windows 8.1.

 

Interesting, I'm surprised that Kali ran well on that machine. Were you using the default GNOME desktop environment?

 

raptir, yes, I used everything by default. The only problems were - subwoofer not working and overreaction on pressing brightness keys, no performance problems whatsoever though. Since the machine was intended not for me, I've decided to try something simpler. Lubuntu seemed to run well at my place, however refused to work with the same model router at end users' and lagged despite adjusted swappiness. So, instead of further experimenting, I dropped in another 1GB stick so that Windows could run swapless, and installed 8.1.

 

I'm really sad to hear Crunchbang is being discontinued. It was a fun OS and I still run it on my netbook server.
http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=416493#p416493

 

I've never actually *ran* it as a permanent OS, but as a light "live" distro to test older hardware for basic faults it sure was an excellent option.

 

I'm pretty sad about this.

 

Looks like someone is stepping up to continue the distro.

http://jimlynch.com/linux-articles/crunchbang-linux-is-back-from-the-dead/

but now its based off of debian testing. https://crunchbangplusplus.org/

 

I am so going to spin that up in a VM!
Sent from my Lumia 1520

 

This is an old running thread, but I've been using PC-BSD lately mostly with the Lumina Desktop.

 

Just installed Bodhi linux 3.0.0 legacy on my netbook server to upgrade from the now discontinued crunchbang.
Its using 65mb of ram on a fresh boot with nothing running except htop. (connected via ssh, no gui).

 

Glad to hear about another Bodhi guy, the 32 bit with Enlightenment 19 runs very well on a Pentium M circa 2007 w/2 GB Ram for me. Jeff H left for a while but is back and working almost around the clock to make this great distro viable again. Only issue I have is hibernate does not work properly but sleep is fine

 

Interesting little distro. I currently have it running "live" on an old ThinkPad T42p and it feels pretty snappy. No audio, though, but I'll get to figuring that one out sometime tomorrow.