On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 16:37:58 -0500 zoe@xxxxxxxxxx wrote: > Hey, I'm sort of new to *nix in general and very new to FC3, which I > have just installed on a PII 350, 64MB Ram, 4,3G HD. It is a dual boot > with WIN 98 SE. The following are a couple questions which I haven't > been able to figure out: > 1.My specs are far from optimal; gnome absolutely crawls, I don't much > care for FCE, and I haven't yet tried KDE. All I would really like is > something simple with a nice fast file browser. It's not your processor speed that's *really* the problem. It's most likely a small amount of RAM and a slow hard drive that are your problems. Upgrade your hard drive to something larger/faster and your system will be quite a bit snappier. Definitely upgrade your RAM - most of today's desktop environments with file browsers need more than 64MB of RAM. And if you don't like XFCE, you're pretty much stuck unless you want to compile your own. I don't know of any PII-class systems that can ONLY support 64MB of RAM. (Heck, my P233 laptop can take 96MB). > A friend has recomended Afterstep, however the latest version of Fedora > Core for which RPM's are available is FC2. Can this afterstep be > installed on FC3? In general can RPMs for earlier versions of FC be > installed on later versions? Try them (although does afterstep have a file browser?). I've used FC2 RPMs on FC3 without much trouble. If they install and fail, you can always RPM -e them. If source RPMs are available, you may be able to rebuild them for FC3, but on a RAM/disk limited system, that might be painful. > 2. At the moment I only have X11 installed, which is good enough for > now, except that I cannot figure out how to mount my digital camera > through usb (I use it as a thumbdrive) Gnome would do this > automatically, creating an icon named 'NO_NAME' on the desktop. Under > X-11 a folder called 'NO_NAME' appears in /media/ but it contains > nothing. You should be able to mount that drive using: mount /media/NO_NAME ...without editing any files. > 4. I don't have a television, much less a dvd player in my apartment, > however I would like to be able to watch DVD's. What is the minimum > for acceptable mpeg2 decoding in Mplayer? is such a thing possible on > a PIII 350? Depends on what you define as "acceptable". You won't get full frame rate on your system, but you should be able to watch most DVDs by dropping frames. This *also* depends on what graphics card you have in the machine. As a benchmark, I used to watch DVDs on a PII/300 system running Fedora Core 1 (A Thinkpad 770), and most DVDs were at least watchable using mplayer and ogle. Ogle was faster. My Thinkpad 770 did have about 5x the RAM of yours, though. :) -- -------------------------------------------------------------------- * Charles Taylor <tomalek@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> * Chemistry teacher, Linux enthusiast! -------------------------------------------------------------------- * Web: http://home.mindspring.com/~charletiv/ --------------------------------------------------------------------
