lubuntu-qa team mailing list archive

[alan c <aeclist@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(new team member here......)

I had a Pentium II - 400 PC  holding up some shelves (literally) and
heard the call for low spec PCS.

Am I correct in thinking that the PII chipset will necessarily be non
pae? And is the objective of this sort of test that the Lubuntu kernel
is pae compatible, and does it work on the ancient PCs?

My PII 400Mhz Pc was running Ubuntu 7.04 (and win 98) using 281MB RAM
total, and I reduced that to
128MB (PC133, CL3) ram for the test.

I used  a 32 bit  alternate CD Lubuntu beta1, and the CD self check in
the PC passed ok, verifying also the CD drive.

I used manual directed install, continuing the PC existing
configuration as a dual boot with Windows 98. Wired ethernet.

The install went quite normally as far as I could see.

This install process took about 2 hours 10 minutes.

The PC then booted ok, took just over 3 minutes to get to login
request and a further 5 or so minutes to show a completed desktop.
Subsequent startups might possibly go faster, I have not yet tried that.

However, a very significant thing occurred soon after startup and this
was that, for a solid two and half hours, the PC was almost literally
un usable because of a constant activity.

My guess is that it was maybe an indexing of updates status, I am not
sure. However, I managed to view task manager and for the whole of
this period the CPU as maxed at 100%, the memory indication was almost
constant at 109MB out of 116MB indicated, and the hard drive access
light was full on with obvious continuous hard drive activity.

After the two and half hours it fell away and the quiescent values are
cpu 3%, memory 53MB of 116MB.

A rapid  and continuous movement of the mouse cursor takes the cpu up
to near 30% - this is the low resource machine speaking of course.

What struck me was how impractical it would be to attempt an install
in this machine with any normal expectations of the post install
situation, or maybe other tasks also.
I have not yet attempted updates but it would sensibly be an overnight
job.

I wonder if there is a way of reducing the priority of the update (?
if that is what it is) indexing here?  Or maybe giving (me) some
control over when the indexing is to be done, or its priority.
Intuitively, the machine is not usable at this stage. So, many users
would simply write it off. I do not know if  more ram will help, it is
something  for later?

I have not done further checks such as confirm that the swap partition
is in place and apparently normal, but the install configuration
seemed ok. Swap is (should be) 370MB.

Summary so far: it does install ok, but the resources are totally
consumed for hours  initially following install and re start.

Other timings after the initial dust has settled:

File manager appears in 13 seconds (cpu 100%)
web browser chrome 1 min 42 initial  startup and 1 min subsequent.
Most of this time seems to be spent getting the Google sign up pages
ready, because the homepage (now set to www.google.co.uk) refreshes in
6 seconds by itself. If Google  encumber chrome browser with a
crapware sign up log in page, then in a PC like this is it a lead
balloon. Of course, maybe the user wants to sign in, but this is a low
resource PC and could be on a low speed network etc. (?)  I dont know
how firefox runs in these conditions yet.

I do not know enough about chrome browser to know yet how to make it
remember  that I do *not* want to be asked to sign in.

enough for tonight.

More I hope anon.

Comments please?
-- 
alan cocks
Ubuntu user #10391
Linux user #360648