Compiz Fusion running great on a Pentium 2/450!

And they say it isn't quite possible, that it would be too slow to do anything.

I'm here to prove this wrong. I am running Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon on my nine-year-old Pentium 2 computer. It has a 450mhz processor, 320MB of RAM, and a 64MB ATI Radeon 7500 graphics card.

Compiz Fusion runs absolutely great (sometimes even better than some better equipped computers I've seen) and it makes no hit on performance. In fact, it runs better than Windows 98 did on this thing back in the day!

Watch as I demonstrate Compiz Fusion's awesomeness.

(Yes, I know the monitor looks brand new and not from the P2 era-- it is in fact new. The original monitor blew up a few weeks ago =/)

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• linux
• ubuntu
• 7.10
• gutsy
• gibbon
• compiz
• fusion
• 3D
• desktop
• effects
• pentium
• 2
• 450
• awesome

[LordMMX66MHz]

sorry i never responded, i closed my davejoshmom1 account so flash itself is slow right?

[MrKsoft]

@SeltsamerAttraktor Ah, whoops, I completely glazed over that factor. Gotta love the bloat of Flash! I can't even figure out how you write software that poorly.

[SeltsamerAttraktor]

@MrKsoft Given that the CPU is strong enough, the decoding itself is not the problem with Flash videos. Flash itself is. It made it ridiculously slow. Using mplayer on the flv file always worked, 480p @ 800Mhz pIII.

[MrKsoft]

@SeltsamerAttraktor I don't remember if I tried, but based on the Windows performance I'm going to say no. On the other hand, it way work given a video card with H264 decoding onboard. However these cards are relatively recent and so the AGP versions are relatively expensive due to the extremely low demand and nature of the card (a PCIe card bridged to work on AGP... quite the hack!)

[SeltsamerAttraktor]

@MrKsoft 2 How badly do Flash videos perform? Can you actually play at least 360p on that thing?

The fscking Flash plugin has always been my least favorite thing. On Windows, it still runs fine on such a system like yours. On Linux, it takes a beast to run well enough (1,5+Ghz I'd say). Ended up using mplayer on the cache files.

[SeltsamerAttraktor]

@MrKsoft Oh I messed around with those kind of computers some years ago, back when Feisty was still fresh. I still have some of those systems, so could try it again,when I have some time to kill.

In fact, due to being broke at that time,I even tried Gentoo on a PIII machine. My main system broke,I pulled the HD out (G optim. for i686),and used the best spare hardware I could find on my shelves. KDE3.5,very slick, was shitty as hell still. Guess what? VIA. (800Mhz, 384Mb, Gf4Mx440).

[MrKsoft]

@SeltsamerAttraktor It's the venerable 440BX chipset. The board itself is a Gateway OEM deal. I believe the official name is the SE440BX-3 "Tabor" (might've been Tabor 2, I forget). Regarding distros, I imagine most today are simply too hefty (this probably wouldn't go so well with 11.10) however you might be able to make something work if you work from the ground up, for instance using Arch Linux. I bet XFCE with it would be a good performer. I might try it just to see!

[SeltsamerAttraktor]

@MrKsoft No srsly. I gave the video a thumbs up for actually accomplishing that.

I have tried many different combinations of PII - PIII, Athlon XP class hardware with various distros and desktop environments, and the results were always quite .... disappointing to say the least ( aka ran like shit). You must have some pretty bad ass chipset in there. Could you be bothered to give me the exact model name of your mainboard?

[MrKsoft]

@SeltsamerAttraktor Thank you for your vote of confidence.

[SeltsamerAttraktor]

Must be fake. Cannot be true.