On 11/11/20 9:43 PM, Charles Curley wrote:
I have an old comp (CPU Pentium II Celeron 400 MHz, 224 MB RAM)
running ham radio server in Debian 8. It works well in CLI, but very
slow after starting GUI. I wonder whether it would be worth to try
(if possible at all) to upgrade it to Debian 9. Any experience with
such old boxes?
It is not clear whether you are merely observing that it is slow with a
GUI running, or whether you would like to have a GUI, and are asking
for advice specifically there.
Assuming the latter, what do you want out of a GUI? An absolute minimal
GUI such as FVWM might serve you well enough, but I would not expect
miracles. Also consider a lightweight desktop such as XFCE. But I would
be surprised if that solution helped.
At first, I wondered whether Pentium II Celeron 400 MHz, 224 MB RAM,
would make it even bootable after upgrading 8 to 9. (Without any GUI, if
needed to be removed before the upgrade).
And when bootable, what GUI might be workable at best (Mate, Xfce, ...)?
As I said, for nothing much more than occasional Thunderbird, or any
other compatible mail client that can use the CLI-based ham email server
(FBB), to process pop3/smtp mails by using copy/paste by mouse click etc.
At this stage (Debian 8) I do that in MATE + Thunderbird. It's slow but
works. What is not known is whether that would work in Debian 9.
