Hi all!
I want to cheer up and write thanks with a small success story of
Devuan and comparison to Debian.
I have an old Toshiba Satellite laptop, with a wonderful soft touch
keyboard, PS/2 Port, Serial console... very readable screen (althoug
800x600!) which always had Debian which I kept upgrading and
upgrading.
It became less and less usable... only swap swap and slow as hell.
Of course, the Specs are not impressive: Celeron (Mendocino) at 433Mhz
and 128MB of RAM and Trident CYper videocard, still they worked and I
did not add programs, jsut running the same old stuff (actually,
removed the browsing suite based on SeaMonkey since Debian stopped
having it, IceApe IIRC... which remained there with a lot of old
libraries).
I had a got hold of another PATA Hard Disk, so I swapped it in,
installed Devuan from scratch, matching about the same setup in terms
of installed packages (legacy Xorg, windowmaker and all GNUstep
packages selfcompiled from source). Home directory copied back.
Wow! The computer is now much more usable now, wonderful! Perfectly
fine.
system-V RC instead of SystemD means much more ram, everything is
snappier! Slightly slower boot time, but then faster computer.
In fact, I am typing this email right now using GNUstep on my
Satellite!
This is on Ascii, I don't know if Beowulf will be harder, so part of
the improvement is a bit also "getting back" right now, yet I am
impressed.
Keep up the good work. And I propose to keep up "plain" 686 kernels
and support for "old" videocards (again a pledge in this direction).
Maybe a kernel without PAE would incour in less performance penalty,
even? I rememebr seeing them around in older Debian times. What do you
think? Or is it mandatory now? I think it has a speed penalty and if
no more than 3GB are needed... it has no visible gain, or?
Cheers,
Riccardo
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