Dave Ihnat <dihnat <at> dminet.com> writes:
> with Windows ME or Windows XP Home ever have upgraded (and they usually
> find-- especially the former--that the hardware can't hack the upgrade.)
This is not that big an issue with Fedora. The most memory-hungry part of
Fedora is actually the installer, and you can bypass that by using a depsolver
like yum or apt on a running system with lots of swap space for your upgrades
instead. The CPU is mostly irrelevant for the core OS. (Some apps like
OpenOffice.org 2 and Eclipse are another story. But there are more lightweight
alternatives, e.g. AbiWord or KWord instead of OO.o Writer. And even here, RAM
is more of a limiting factor than CPU power, the main problem is HDD thrashing
caused by swapping panic.)
Case in point, I'm running FC6 on a 266 MHz laptop which originally shipped
with Window$ 98 (The first exemplaries sold even came with Window$ 95!), with
RAM upgraded from 32 MB to the maximum supported (160 MB). I had to fight some
interesting battles with Anaconda, so for FC5->FC6 I just used apt-get
dist-upgrade and that worked fine (unlike the horror stories from some Ubuntu
users). But once installed, KDE just works. I have a more powerful desktop for
everyday use, but when I need a laptop, the 266 MHz one works fine.
Kevin Kofler
