[TriLUG] Laptop and L.A.M.P.

[William Sutton]

As a matter of fact, it's possible to run X on a box of these specs and 
have it run fine.  I used to run Red Hat 6.x on a Sony Vaio with a 2.1 Gb 
disk, Pentium II (mobile) 233, and 64 Meg of RAM, with X and 
enlightenment+Gnome (at the time considered the biggest resource hog 
around) and it still felt faster than Windows.

That said, of course, those who are used to newer hardware will find this 
combination slow now.  I have the same laptop running Red Hat 9, and there 
is a marked performance drop off (upgraded the HDD to 6.4 Gb as the old 
one was failing).  I'd like to try Gentoo on it as I think it's the RH9 
deps that slow the thing down.

You might try a laptop of this vintage (perhaps even the same model--Sony 
PCG-505GX 
http://search.ebay.com/PCG-505GX_W0QQfkrZ1QQfromZR8QQsatitleZPCG-505GX).  
Linux runs on it well (at least Red Hat 6.x, 7.x, and 9), sound card is 
supported (old onboard soundblaster), hibernate-to-disk works out of the 
box (although if you upgrade the hard disk (you should), you'll need 
elphdisk to create the suspend partition (I can help with that).

The other benefit of this particular laptop is its size--3 lbs and less 
than 1" thick.  Nice if you want to take it places without developing a 
case of compressed vertebrae :)

William


On Sat, 14 May 2005, Jason Tower wrote:

> if you don't need X, a box with a pentium II, 128mb, and a 4 to 6gb disk 
> is plenty to run a basic LAMP setup.  of course, it won't be blazing 
> fast and your storage capacity will be limited but enough to get you 
> started.
> 
> i have a couple of older laptop lying around that meet those specs, ping 
> me offline if you're interested.
> 
> jason
> 
> matt-nc wrote:
> > I'm thinking about getting a laptop that would run current versions of 
> > Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP so I could work on learning those things at 
> > a library.
> > 
> > What would be the minimum hardware requirements for that setup to work 
> > pretty good -- ie. processor and speed, RAM, hard disk?
> > 
> > Any thoughts or suggestions on the subject would be appreciated, 
> > including recommendations of good sources for a used machine.
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > Matt
> > 
> > 
> > 
>