From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Jan 21 06:20:25 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 51AB416A4CE for ; Fri, 21 Jan 2005 06:20:25 +0000 (GMT) Received: from luzifer.incubus.de (incubus.de [80.237.207.83]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id F00C943D39 for ; Fri, 21 Jan 2005 06:20:20 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from mkb@incubus.de) Received: from [192.168.2.11] (pD9E6893A.dip.t-dialin.net [217.230.137.58]) (using TLSv1 with cipher DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by luzifer.incubus.de (Postfix) with ESMTP id A8C9730196 for ; Fri, 21 Jan 2005 07:20:14 +0100 (CET) Message-ID: <41F09F43.1080300@incubus.de> Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 07:20:51 +0100 From: Matthias Buelow User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 (X11/20050108) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org References: <200501200929.j0K9TXbl022106@mp.cs.niu.edu> <41EF92A2.30506@incubus.de> <237219580.20050120154929@wanadoo.fr> <20050120153926.GO22814@thingy.apana.org.au> In-Reply-To: <20050120153926.GO22814@thingy.apana.org.au> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 06:20:25 -0000 David Gerard wrote: > So something around 500MHz will happily run Pango and the other > cutting-edge internationalisation stuff if you fill it with memory. My experience is that with a 500Mhz Pentium 3 (512K cache, 512mb RAM, Matrox G450 AGP graphics), Gnome (2.6 tested) is unbearably slow. A large factor here is the Xft font rendering (Ok, you could use xterm instead of gnome-terminal, or switch off antialiasing), which is unaccelerated (at least was then), and _brutally_ slow. If you run something with copious output in gnome-terminal, it'll more or less lock up the entire machine. I don't normally use Gnome, but evaluated it on that old machine for some reason that is of no interest here. KDE is a bit faster, don't know why, but seems to use more RAM. IMHO you need at least a 2.8 or 3GHz P-IV for that kind of desktop to get things to run well, and, in my experience, raw CPU power here is the dominating factor. Of course these machines are still perfectly usable with windowmaker, or fvwm, or similar. mkb.