[luau] learning the hardware end

[cpaul at telemetrybox.org]

> One thing I know is that the Debian/KDE installation I had on my 166 was 
> not something I would like students using for a class on word processing or 
> spreadsheets.  It was way too sloooow.  To me, if you sacrifice some 
> funtionality in order to gain speed and responsiveness it would be a good 
> tradeoff, since the longer you can keep the student's attention/interest 
> the more he/she will learn.

Ahhh, building good systems with Debian can be tricky.  My only tip (without seeing the box) would be to scrap KDE (the whole suite is bloatware) and use a low-profile window manager like blackbox or windowmaker to handle the GUI.  Abiword was relatively fast on that kind of hardware back in the halcyon days of '99. 

Who knows, it still might be low-bloat... :)


> I might be wrong on the linux performance issue when used on a 166.  It 
> might have been that my non-existent linux skills were the catalysts to a 
> lousy linux installation, thus degrading performance of my computer to 
> snail speed.  But if snail speed is the norm when running a standard 
> version of linux on a 166, then I would highly recommend looking for a way 
> to improve performance.

"Speed" is rather subjective...  but i tend to think of the user experience on a well-configured P166 as being spiffy.  3D and other such CPU intensive tasks will still be dog-slow compared to a PII-class machine.