It's been about a year since I booted my mom's old computer. It was last updated with a PCLOS 2009 KDE Full install, and I found that I could not get it to accept any newer KDE disks after the repos for that shut down. Since my mother was one of those technophobes who could not stand to have ANYTHING change (Change?! egad!), I just left it alone.
Fast forward to tonight. It's been a year since I booted it, at least... mom passed a year ago, and I didn't have much need for it. But I was thinking maybe I could fire it up again and see if it still works. Well, it fired up, but the 2009 install being so far out of date was driving me nuts. Knowing it wouldn't likely boot with the full KDE version, and remembering how sllloooowwwwww it was with that setup (256 megabytes RAM here), I burned PCLOS LXDE 2011.6 and went to town.
In spite of the claimed minimum of 384 megs for this version, it booted just fine. Installed just fine. Runs just fine. Updated just fine... and everything else just fine. Maybe the 384 megs is for speed or if you don't have a swap partition. But even that is suspicious, since TOP is reporting between 207 and 217 megabytes of RAM in use, and none of the 4 gigabyte swap partition has been touched. I've ripped out all the proggies I don't like and installed the ones I do, and I have updated the system, and I'm coming to you from Firefox... no problems, as long as there's no intense disk access going on.
Quick thought: firefox seems an odd choice of browsers, given how much faster Chromium is...
Anyway, thanks Tex and Neal, you guys have allowed me to revive my mom's old computer. Now I just have to figure out what to use it for...
