Linspire equivalent

Neil Barras said the following, on 03-19-05 15:16:

First of all, congratulations and good luck.

Following on to your initial question (about the suitability of Linspire), I think you will find that the speed of your CPU, for most things, will not be a particularly important factor. Vector is a good choice; if you ever find interactive performance a bit sluggish (with Vector or any other distro), the first things I would try are:

1. Turn off unnecessary "eye candy" in the desktop window manager. 2. Try a "lighter weight" desktop, like IceWM or XFCE, as compared to KDE or Gnome. 3. Add additional RAM.

Even back a dozen years ago, we found that for Unix machines (Sun SPARCs), adding RAM was typically much more effective per $ in increasing performance than having a faster CPU. (The exception would be things like video editing or other applications known to be CPU-intensive.)

With respect to the filesystem choice, any of the three you mentioned is good, The 'ext2' system is probably the most commonly used. I typically use 'ext3', which is essentially 'ext2' with journaling of metadata added; the journaling permits more rapid recovery after a crash. One advantage it has is that ext3 filesystems can be read by anything that can read ext2. ReiserFS v.3 also has journaling; you can select journaling of metadata or all data.

There is a newer v.4 of Reiser available (whether packaged for Vector, I don't know). You can read about it here:

HTH, Rich

-- Rich Gibbs