PCLinuxOS 2010 System Requirements??? {PCLOS 2010 KDE-4 Upgrade}

[horusfalcon]

Hi, Everyone,

I'm one of those Luddites who has an older computer.  My wife has the nice shiny LinPC box computer, a present from me when her old Duron 1.3 machine crashed in early January of last year, so she's gonna be okay for the coming upgrade, but me?

Oh, no.  I've got a Gateway 3522GZ laptop that I purchased refurbished from Tiger Direct in 2005 right after Katrina.  Worse yet, my backup computer is a 700 MHz Athlon machine we have affectionately dubbed "Frankenputer" because it was put together from junk parts, and one of the case sides doesn't fit right, so it looks kinda gnarly.  

It's true what they say about a mechanic's car being a junk heap, I guess (I'm an A+ and manage 72 pentablets at work running XP Pentablet Edition for work control, and my personal machine is a Frankenstein movie refugee...).

My Gateway has a nice external monitor hooked to it, 1366 X 768 flat panel (because the backlight's out on the laptop's regular display, but I digress), and it has 1 GB of RAM, but I'm wondering if that Mobile Pentium M 735 (1.6 GHz) CPU is stout enough to tote this new distro with KDE4?

I have no immediate prospects for a hardware upgrade unless my computer repair sideline makes a lot more money, so I'm kinda stuck.  I'd really like to know if I need to just wait for a 2010 LXDE re-spin or something, or should I try running KDE4 (I really like KDE3, and have been wanting to try the new stuff).

So, anyone wanna help me out here?  I think I'm not the only one in this situation, and many others may benefit from an overview of 2010's features and requirements as opposed to 2009.2.

Thanks in Advance,
D

[Rudge]

You will be fine. 

[parnote]

I agree with Rudge ... you will be fine. The memory and processor requirements for KDE 4 are not as steep as you might imagine. There have been many reports of folks successfully running KDE 4 on netbooks with a 1.6 GHz Atom processor, which is about on par with your processor. The KDE 4 memory requirements are a minimum of 256 MB of memory, with 512 MB or more recommended. So, with your 1 GB memory, you should be more than set. The only thing that you may want to look at is possibly upgrading your video card to one with a faster GPU and as much video memory as you can afford.

Of course, I have no doubts that the remastered 2010 versions (Phoenix, PCLXDE, e17) will be just as robust as the "mother ship."

parnote

[horusfalcon]

This video card is an Intel 855GM, and it shares 32 megs of main RAM.  It seems to do 1366 X 768 at 32-Bit well enough.  I don't see myself being able to switch video cards on this laptop (and I've been in and out of it several times now - replaced a keyboard, a CPU cooling fan, you know, the simple stuff   ), so we'll give it a go and see what happens.  After all, I've always got the option of changing the default session type when I'm doing something really system-intensive.

Thanks for the info.  So... when's 2010 due out?  Just any day now, huh?

Later On,
D

[parnote]

horusfalcon,

Check the bios of your computer and see if it will allow you to specify more shared memory to be used by the laptop's video card. Many bios have settings to allow you to set it. If you can, I'd recommend -- at minimum -- increasing it to 64 MB, 128 MB would be better, and 256 MB would be best.

parnote