Loading SuSE Linux 8.0 on Compaq Armada 1562DT

 

 

Prehistory:

 

I asked my bro to give me his 4 year old notebook for some job that i had to do. What i needed -- is to use it as an X-termnal to access Sun Solaris workstation via network. That notebook had Windows 98SE installed, so i planned to get some tools like SecureSSH (ssh client) and XManager (good X-server for Windows) for it. But my bro complained on often hangs and faults of his software on this notebook, so he asked me to format the harddisk completely, and install everything he needs (Windows + Office) from the scratch in order to use it as a mobile typewriter and intenet browser (via his new GPRS phone ;-) ).

 

I though -- OK, I'll do it, but since I had to format the hardrive anyway, maybe I'll install Linux there for a while!

 

And here the tail begins. Today's prime actor is:

 

Notebook: Compaq Armada 1562DT

Specs: CPU: Intel Mobile Pentium 233 MMX

RAM: 64MB (upgraded)

HDD: 3GB

Video: PCI C&T F68554

Sound: ESS 1878

Display: 12" TFT

Pointer: touchpad

 

I will compare the results with my working home desktop system:

Celeron 333 (overclocked up to 500MHz -- FSB set to 100MHz), 512MB RAM,

Matrox G400 video, AWE32sound, 17" monitor.

 

OS: SuSE Linux 8.0 pro.

 

 

Beginning:

 

Then I took my SuSE 8.0 professional CDs, and started install procedure. It started smoothly, I really enjoyed new SuSE's Yast2 installer, which gave me the easiest OS install ever! First it offered me to shrink existing Windows partition and use the rest as Linux, than i said no, and in 4 clicks i selected to Remove existing windows partition (leaving a volume named "Compaq dignostic tools" alone -- just for a case), and it offered me to create 128MB Swap, 20MB "/boot" and use the rest as "/" under reiserfs -- I agreed to it, and continued.

Since I already believe myself as an "expirienced linux user", I payed more that an hour to select the packages I needed, so that they would take lesser harddrive space. I selected developers tools, KDE, GNOME , some networking tools, -- totally: 2.5 GB, then selected the rest of options (language, timezone, etc), and proceeded. Installing packages from the first CD took more that an hour and a half, and 2 hours for the rest disks.

 

to compare: on my desktop system copying packages from one CD takes less than 10minutes.

 

reference: about two or three years ago, that notebook had Windows 95 installed, and my bro asked me to install Windows 98 there. On Compaq site there was a note -- that Windows 98 should not be installed there without the special BIOS upgrades -- so I had to get numerous "rompaqs" and only then to proceed with upgrading windows. Now, to set up Linux I did nothing special -- I just took the distribution CD and proceeded with answering onscreen questions!.

 

I experienced no troubles configuring X server (several clicks confirming pre-selected options),

So in 5 hours i had the system Set up and working. First thing i wondered to see, is how KDE3 would run on such machine. It was a big surprise to me that .... it started worked! Then i selected in Yast2 that i have PCMCIA network card (3Com EtherLinkIII) -- and it worked! I had some troubles with sound -- it worked only with sb8 driver -- thats all.

 

I made no special hacks to any system configuration files -- everything was set up with their famous YaST2 setup utility. (well -- honestly, I changed some /etc/sysconfig/console params to work with Cyrillic, and set up russian keyboard in XF86Config, then I run built-in fetchmsttffonts script to get Microsoft TTF fonts -- the only good scalable unicode fonts with cyrillic -- but that is all).

 

when I was selecting packages with Yast2 -- it showed my that I had only 100MB left, but when the setup was over -- 'df' showed that i had nearly 500MB free on my drive! I believe that is because Yast2 calculated package sizes as if i was installing them to ext2 partion, and here the reiserfs showed it's advantages!

 

 

How does it feel ?

 

When I turn it on, it takes 1.5 minutes for linux to start, untill KDM window appears, and another minute to KDE3 to load.

 

to compare: on my home system it flows two times faster. On a pentuim-III at my university it runs even twice times faster than on my home system.

 

I can open Konquerror and browse WWW in several windows, work with KOffice not-big documents -- but all that runs noticeably slower than on my home desktop. I dont even tell how much does it take to start Mozilla or OpenOffice, and how slow it feels when you used to work on Pentium-III and Pentium-IV systems. Besides, as soon as I log into KDE, I notice that some swap memory is already in use. So I'd say, that 64MB of RAM that I have on this notebook is a minimum requirement to work with KDE, but for this notebook the standard RAM size is 32MB! The same with GNOME (v 1.4) -- the desktop itself seems to be little faster than KDE, but the Nautilus runs the same slow as the Konquerror! Playing MP3 in XMMS takes about 60% of CPU time, and i even did not test full-screen MP4 video on it. 3D does not exist here. Besides -- its CD-ROM does not recognise some of my CD-RW disks.

 

 

Watching a pulse on a peg-leg?

 

Well, if you are eager to sacrifice slick design and other visual enhancement of you desktop that you got used to on you big computer, than you are still able to use this notebook of some productive work. For example -- WindowMaker starts almost instantly. When it is loaded -- it uses twice less memory than KDE does. Abiword and Galeon start pretty fast, and besides -- OpenOffice and Mozilla start much faster when KDE is not loaded, so that I agree to work with them within this window manager, using Xterm with zsh as my filemanager ;-).

 

conclusion:

 

This notebook with 64MB of RAM will serve good as an X-terminal or as a document-editing, cards-playing and www-browsing device -- and it hard to expect anything else from it. If you want more -- get yourself somewhat like Pentum-II 300MHz/128MB RAM or higher.

 

remark:

 

I tried to remove the 32MB of RAM from this notebook (leaving the default configuration). KDE3 started, but feels quite unusable -- such configuration appears to be usable for nothing else but simple text typing and X-terminal.

 

 

Vitaly Shishakov.

postgraduate student at

Department of Physics,

Moscow State University

shift@cmpd2.phys.msu.su