Thanks for a civil reply. As you might have noticed, the ad hominem attacks are flying.
The machine I'm running RH9 on is a PII MMX 300 with 256mb of ram and a 40gb drive (Dell Optiplex). I figured it was fast enough to run Win2K so it would be plenty of machine to run Linux. I originally had only 128 mb of RAM, enough for Win2K but not even close for RH9.
I'll have a PIII 650 machine with 256mb available in a few weeks. I'll try that. I think I'll try it with the Redhat Pro box set before I spend time downloading something else.
If I'm going to run this as a desktop environment, it has to run XWindows and Open Office at a decent rate.
I'll spend the next few weeks trying to figure out how to get the network printer to work. I think I've read 200 pages on Samba so far. It just won't see my network printers.
Thanks again for the civil reply.
I find the cutoff is 500mhz 512k P3s and I like 512 mbytes(256 is min for me). Anything slower can't run the heavy gui. Faster cpus don't do much but cost more, especially if you are just internet browsing and doing office/gnucash type tasks. You can even play some games quite nicely. WinXP on the same box is no better or no worse, just costs more.
I canibalized all my older machines when gnome 2.0 came out. The new feature rich guis don't do well on slow limited memory boxes. The new 2.6 kernel due RSN will speed up things a notch and lengthen the life of P3s even further. I won't touch a machine if it is under the mins. I then go to recommending white box machines, like Walmart or others. UNIX has always liked cache so you can gain a lot of speed from extra processor and disk cache, the new 8mB cache disks are the trick setup.
Open Office has been slow to load on most systems. There has been some recent tuning done which GREATLY improves the startup times and somewhat speeds up the base program. Look for updated rpms RSN, OpenOffice.org is doing some qa on them now. ABIWord is fine if you are just doing light wp tasks(what most peopel do). I use OpenOffice to translate and ABIWord to work with the docs. If you don't need the features, why pay for the baggage.
I you have the net bandwidth download Koppix 3.3 11-03 version ... here is the forum
http://www.knoppix.net/forum/. Burn a cd and stick it in any system. It doesn't disturb what you have on the box but allows you to quickly see what the fit with Linux is like. It is a full blown KDE debian cd and if you want to install it you can do it from the cd. Takes about 20 minutes to install to disk on my test 'slow dog'. Win2003 entrprise server took almost 3 hours when I did a OEM install on the same hardware. Win2003 did run somewhat faster since it has most of the consumer stuff stripped out.
There really isn't much measureable difference in the Linux versions as far as performance goes. Most enterprise kernels are just backporting some 2.6 kernel features to speed up things. Using the appropiate kernel compiler switches is what gives you the selection and variation. The 'pro' versions just cost more and have a few extras in the box.
Interested to see how you do.