proggR Posted September 22, 2008 Share Posted September 22, 2008 I have an old Powermac G3 B+W and I'm going to be repartitioning a second drive so that it has a data partition as well as a partition for some distro of linux. Since its an older machine I'm very concerned with finding a distro that isn't too burdensome. Right now I'm looking into either Gentoo or Xubuntu because I've been hearing good things about XFCE. Does anyone know offhand which one takes up more resources. I would assume Xubuntu because Gentoo from what I understand Gentoo has you customize the install for your machine but does less installed packages translate to lowered system power expectations? I don't imagine I'll be doing anything all that intensive. It'll probably be mostly for a basic file server/internet browser. But I'd like to be able to do that (and maybe listen to music at the same time) without feeling the lag I experience with OSX 10.2.1 thats on it now (10.2.8 is on the drive that will now be master and feels quite a bit quicker but is still a little slow feeling). Anyway. Any help would be great. I'm definitely a *nix newb. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jordanwb Posted September 22, 2008 Share Posted September 22, 2008 With Gentoo you have to compile anything. Try Kubuntu, I found it a lot faster than Xubuntu on my 8 year old Thinkpad. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maq Posted September 22, 2008 Share Posted September 22, 2008 Xubuntu... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
proggR Posted September 24, 2008 Author Share Posted September 24, 2008 Ya I went with Xubuntu because when I tried to install Gentoo and it was unpacking one of the archives during the install it ran out of memory and if I added the extra RAM module I had here I got a seg fault. It works pretty good. Less latency than OSX has on this machine. I was curios how Debian would run. I have the disc for it too. I might see how I like it because I don't like how the root is setup on these *ubuntu distros. And it won't let me run sudo passwd root because it doesn't let me type a password after that. Who knows? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DarkWater Posted September 24, 2008 Share Posted September 24, 2008 sudo -i That'll get you in as root for other commands. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
proggR Posted September 24, 2008 Author Share Posted September 24, 2008 Aparently its not sudo that isn't working for me but passwords in terminal period. I tried forgoing sudo and just typed passwd username and when it comes to the password prompt it doesn't let me type. Same thing happens when I try setting a root password with sudo. Is there any terminal emulators that may work better than the one xfce uses? I believe its xterm so it should be fine but I don't know for sure. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zq29 Posted September 24, 2008 Share Posted September 24, 2008 When typing passwords into a terminal, you don't get any feedback - Just type the password and hit enter. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
serverman Posted September 24, 2008 Share Posted September 24, 2008 i would say in this case free bsd would be great because you can easly strip it down to barebones and just do what you need it to and it runs XFCE (i like xfce better than kde & gnome) and setup for xfce is easy just have to root> pkg_add -r xfce4 root> echo "/usr/local/bin/startxfce4" > ~/.xinitrc also has a good handbook for new people http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DarkWater Posted September 24, 2008 Share Posted September 24, 2008 Aparently its not sudo that isn't working for me but passwords in terminal period. I tried forgoing sudo and just typed passwd username and when it comes to the password prompt it doesn't let me type. Same thing happens when I try setting a root password with sudo. Is there any terminal emulators that may work better than the one xfce uses? I believe its xterm so it should be fine but I don't know for sure. It doesn't display the characters for security. Just put in a newline after your password and it should be good. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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