Tkinter: The good, the bad, and the ugly!

[Martin Gregorie]

On Wed, 19 Jan 2011 12:45:22 -0800, Patty wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "geremy condra" <debatem1 at gmail.com> To: <patty at cruzio.com>
> On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 10:22 AM,  <patty at cruzio.com> wrote:
>>
>> Now I think I understand a little better where you all are coming from
>> -- I am a Unix person and I guess I expected to have to learn GUI's
>> using whatever is provided for me by default. Which isn't a bad thing.
>> And if I had to add additional software - and learn that - so be it. I
>> am using a Windows XP system and a Windows 7 system presently. Some day
>> I would like to switch out the Windows XP for Unix.
> 
> Just dual boot, it isn't hard.
>

IME you'll find that networking a Windows box to an older, slower PC thats 
rescued from the attic will be much more useful than a single dual-boot 
arrangement. 

Linux will run at a usable speed on a PC with 512 MB RAM  and an 866 MHz 
P3, though some things, such as logging in, will be slow with a graphical 
desktop (runlevel 5), but if it has more RAM or you run an X-server on 
another PC, which could be running Windows, you'll execute commands, 
including graphical ones - provided you have X.11 forwarding enabled, a 
lot faster. The Linux box can also be headless if you haven't a screen 
and keyboard to spare. In short, Linux will run well on a PC that can't 
run anything more recent than Win98 at an acceptable speed. It doesn't 
need a lot of disk either - anything more than 30 GB will do. However, an 
optical drive is needed for installation. You can install Fedora from a 
CD drive provided the box is networked so it can retrieve most of its 
packages over the net, but using a DVD drive would be easier for a first 
install.
 
> True.  I have a Compaq Presario that is so old hardware-wise that I
> don't think it could handle Unix or Linux.
>
What speed and type of CPU does it use? How much RAM? What's about disk 
and optical drives?

FWIW my house server is an IMB Netvista that is at least 10 years old - 
866MHz P3, 512 GB RAM, LG DVD drive, new 160GB hdd and runs Fedora 13. It 
is a bit slow at runlevel 5 (graphical desktop) when driven from its own 
console, but I usually access it over the house net from a more modern 
Core Duo laptop that runs Fedora 14. The NetVista is more than adequate 
for web and RDBMS development (Apache and PostgreSQL) in Python or Java 
and very fast for C compilation.


-- 
martin@   | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org       |