minimums

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bmike1
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minimums

#1 Post by bmike1 »

What is the least you can get away with to run mX14?
cpu?
Ram?
Hard drive space?

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chrispop99
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Re: minimums

#2 Post by chrispop99 »

That's something I've been playing with this week since I acquired a couple of old IBM Thinkpads.

The first is a T41; it has a 1.6GHz Pentium M, with 512 MB RAM. MX-14 ran fairly well live, and once installed gave a system that would be perfectly usable for most folk with modest needs.

The second Thinkpad was an older T23. This has a 1.13GHz Pentium 3, and 256MB RAM, but the optical drive is missing. I used an external optical drive, but the T23 only has USB 1.0. It booted to a live environment, but was almost impossibly slow. Attempting an install failed, although it appeared to complete. I tried installing from the CLI installer, and again it failed. These failures may have been due to the use of the external drive, so maybe are not a fair test.

I used the newer T41 to make an install onto the HDD temporarily removed from the older machine, then put the HDD back back in the T23. It booted and ran, even displaying YouTube video at low resolution, although I wouldn't want to use it on a daily basis.

I upped the RAM in the T23 to 384MB, and performance was improved noticeably, and some people would possibly find it OK at that level of performance.

MX-14 was never intended to be a light version of Mepis however; it's described as mid-weight, and I tend to think of it as antiX on steroids! On a P3 machine I would only use antiX.

HDD space used with a few extra programs added was just over 4GB. I would consider 10GB to be a workable amount for most situations, plus a minimum of 1GB swap.

Chris

Edit: I found an optical drive for the Thinkpad T23, and attempted a graphical install (still with 348MB RAM). It went well, and didn't take that long. My conclusion is that 256MB RAM is very tight for an install, particularly if some of the RAM is shared with video.
Last edited by chrispop99 on Thu Jun 05, 2014 5:05 am, edited 2 times in total.
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zeeone
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Re: minimums

#3 Post by zeeone »

bmike1 wrote:What is the least you can get away with to run mX14?
cpu?
Ram?
Hard drive space?
MX14 has been set for use on mid size, to newer machines. AntiX likes the older machines as well as the newer ones.

I do not think anyone knowns what the limits really are. Load it up and see, maybe it will or will not work, you tell us.

Here MX14 has loaded up on;

Intel 1.4 pent III, 512 RAM, 18 gig HD and runs fast enough to use, AntiX runs better on it. :popcorn:
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uncle mark
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Re: minimums

#4 Post by uncle mark »

Runs perfectly acceptably on a PIII-750MHz/512MB Dell laptop. Gave that machine a new lease on life.
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lucky9
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Re: minimums

#5 Post by lucky9 »

I'd suggest that you always Partition the HDD before trying to install. A SWAP makes things possible where they wouldn't be otherwise.

I have a Desktop miniTower that is a P4-1600 GHz, with 640 MB of RAM. USB 1.1 and 2 (small) PATA hard disks. MX14 runs fine on it as does antiX.
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Pierre
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Re: minimums

#6 Post by Pierre »

some of the older win_xp PCs have
- a 1.5Ghz cpu
- 512Mb ram
- 60Gb hdd
(runs slow - as it has SP3)

& that's probably the realistic minimum for a MX14 install.
- by using it to revive an old PC.

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timkb4cq
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Re: minimums

#7 Post by timkb4cq »

Just for the record, I'm typing this in MX-14 on a Pentium III 500MHz 192MB ram Compaq Armada M700.
It took 8 minutes to boot the CD and over 45 minutes to install with the graphical installer. It boots in 2 minutes from the HD and runs OK for light use - that's old-school one program open at a time.

That 192 MB ram is probably close to the bare minimum for the graphical installer - and there was an existing 500MB swap partition.
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Re: minimums

#8 Post by linux on toast »

i'm running it on a Dell D800, 1.5 ghz cpu, 2 gigs of ram, and 32 megs of borrowed video ram
trying to watch videos can be a challenge , but I like the look and feel, it has.
antiX is faster,though!

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