Why GNOME3 will never be a player on tablets [LWN.net]

Why GNOME3 will never be a player on tablets

Posted Sep 4, 2011 15:20 UTC (Sun) by jlokier (guest, #52227)
In reply to: Why GNOME3 will never be a player on tablets by niner
Parent article: The year of the Linux tablet?

I'll add a data point too.
My old laptop used to run GNOME, Mozilla and a plethora of development tools very well. It has 192MB RAM, and I used it from 1999 to 2006.

I don't expect a modern GUI to fit, but I thought at least a text console with a current distro would be useful as a VPN hub, remote serial ports etc. for I have quite a large network of embedded systems which I develop on remotely.

I quite like Ubuntu Server, so I tried installing Ubuntu 11.04 on my old laptop with 192MB RAM, and it couldn't even run the text-mode installer. After an hour of swapping I gave up. Debian was not much better.

In the end I used debootstrap on another machine to make a Debian image, then copied the filesystem over. It runs fine, but the basic installer doesn't fit -- on a system that used to run GNOME and Mozilla very well.

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Why GNOME3 will never be a player on tablets

Posted Sep 4, 2011 16:38 UTC (Sun) by tshow (subscriber, #6411) [Link]

I find that if you don't have fully modern hardware, it's better to go with something like gentoo or slackware or the like. I think the ubuntu folks have "modern desktop machine" as their baseline, so they work pretty well if you've got a PC that's less than 5 years old, but get creaky otherwise.

I wind up repurposing old hardware as unix/linux boxes fairly often. Generally, I reach for gentoo; it takes a little more fiddling to set up, but it works pretty well even on older hardware. Assuming you don't try to install KDE or GNOME, of course... :)