Before I begin; you'll probably notice that my English isn't that good (but I think it's understandable). If you have some suggestions to improve my English, please let me know;)
Years ago I already played a bit with Linux (It was Redhat 5.0 on my 386). At that time I thought the operating system wasn't yet ready for the desktop and after a while I reinstalled Windows. Things changed when Ubuntu 5.04 was released. This was the first time I really enjoyed Linux; the most important things worked, it was easy and it was just great!
Because I liked Ubuntu so much, I decided to install it on my laptop too and also this worked very good. However, these days Ubuntu is way to heavy to run on my laptop. Because I wanted to have a fast system I tried to install Gentoo Linux; the installation took 3 days but I ended up with a very fast and responsible system. However, every time I had to install a program it took ages to compile the software. So then I started searching to a nice and user-friendly lightweight distribution.
It wasn't as easy as I thought, so I decided to write my experiences down in this review. The following distributions were tested:
Arch 2007.08-2
Damn Small Linux 4.2.5
Puppy 4.0
TinyMe Test7-KD
Xubuntu 8.04
Zenwalk 5.0
How I tested:
As I mentioned before, not only speed was important, but also the user-friendliness: how easily I can connect the system to a Windows-network (share), what graphical setup-utilities are available, if there's a package manager and how it works,...
Another important thing was hardware support; does everything work as it should or are there some problems?
Installation
To start I went through the installation of each distribution. I do not need a nice GUI-installer, but it should be clear and well documented during the installation. Of coarse it's nice if it doesn't take an hour to install the operating system....
First Boot
After installation the system was rebooted. Boottime was measured from Grub to Desktop (login information was entered as quickly as possible) and I ran glxgears to see how well my graphics card was working (this was a problem in the past). Than I took a quick look how well the hardware is detected, which default software is installed and how it performs.
The real work
After the first impressions I played a bit more with the installed distribution. I tried to install the hardware that wasn't detected. Installed some software using the packaging manager (if available) and performed some basic tasks.
These are the specifications of my portable computer:
Compaq Armada E500
CPU: Pentium 3 - 600 MHz
Memory: 256 MB
Hard drive: 10 GB
Optical: Toshiba DVD SD-C2502
VGA: Ati Rage Mobility P/M
Sound: ESS ES1978 Maestro 2E
Wireless: Dlink DWL-G630 (pcmcia; RaLink RT61-chipset)
Before I start with the lightweight distro's I install Ubuntu 8.04 to have a comparison to make sure the lightweight distributions are really faster...
I'll summarize the results:
Installation: 59 minutes
Boot: 120 seconds
After boot system is already swapping, but the system is still usable; not a speedmonster, but usable. It seems Hardy is much faster than Gutsy.
Hardware recognition is good, except installing my wireless card/network was problematic.
glxgears: 119 fps
