Josh Saddler

In the first article of this series, I test-drove three lightweight distros: Fluxbuntu, TinyMe, and SliTaz. I'm in search of a lightweight distro for an ancient 1ghz, 128MB RAM laptop. Of the three distros I tried, I was most impressed with SliTaz.

I took Linux Mint 4.0 Fluxbox Community Edition for a spin yesterday. How did the second Ubuntu-based distro do?

Worst-performing LiveCD ever.

And I mean ever, on any hardware I've had to use. Even booting a Gnome-based LiveCD and running Evolution and OpenOffice on this old laptop showed better performance. Booting Ubuntu 5.04 on my wife's ancient iMac G3 (128MB RAM, CPU about 400mhz) took less time than Linux Mint did.

Linux Mint offers the standard Ubuntu-style bootscreen, followed by an etremely long boot time. There was no way to get detailed boot messages or status, just a splashscreen with a bouncing progress bar. Fluxbuntu at least had the usual function key for verbose boot. The only indication I had that my laptop was still working for the 5 minute bootup was the constant thrashing of the CD drive. Fail for transparency -- I need to know what's going on during the boot process so I can tweak it for my system later, if need be.

Once the graphical desktop was loaded (another 6 minutes), the CD thrashing continued. At this point I was worried about what it might be doing to my drive, but grimly pressed on. Supposedly the LiveCD was using the existing 512MB swap partition on my hard disk, but not very well, as performance was abysmal. Also, just like Fluxbuntu, the annoying fan never turned off.

Desktop load times were further increased because of a couple of panel applets. The first sucked up bandwidth and CPU usage dialing out to find software updates ("1 update available;" who cares since it's a LiveCD?!), and the other took awhile to examine my hardware and tell me "1 restricted driver available." I assume this was for the integrated nVidia graphics chip, but I didn't bother trying to install either update. The functionality is nice enough, I suppose, but really shouldn't be activated in a limited-resource environment like the LiveCD.

Mint contains a minimal Fluxbox environment, with a single desktop "Install" icon, presumably provided by iDesk. Alone among the distros I've tried so far, Linux Mint does not by default display a more practical panel like FBpanel, Perlpanel, or Pypanel. However, in the Fluxbox menu there was an entry to start FBpanel. Why couldn't that have been already running, replacing the extremely limited Fluxbox toolbar? I clicked it, and discovered why. It took 8 minutes to load. Eight minutes to launch FBpanel, fer cryin' out loud. FBpanel is known for being tiny and fast; I had no problems with it in the other distros. The Mint panel starts up on the bottom of the screen, right under the Fluxbox toolbar. Fail for positioning; they shouldn't both occupy the same space.

I poked around the Fluxbox menu to see what was available. Linux Mint offers its own toplevel menu, laid out mostly sensibly by the developers. But for some reason, the menus generated by Fluxbox are also available at the bottom, and those are confusing as heck. The one nice thing is that the application name was displayed, rather than just "Picture viewer." Fluxbox's generated menus were quite poorly designed; it would have been better if the developers had left it out, in favor of their own menu. The generated Fluxbox menu had the most application entries (though poorly laid out, in multiple submenus), the Mint-designed menu had fewer listings, though better organized, and the FBpanel menu has the fewest entries, though it's the layout most familiar to Gnome and Xfce users.

Software selection is okay; the filemanager seems to be Rox, but I couldn't get it to actually load. Several minutes of disk churning, and then things went back to normal. At least OpenOffice isn't bundled with Linux Mint; who knows what that would have done. The Xfce Terminal is included, but its performance is just as piss-poor as the rest of the apps on the CD. Took 3 minutes to launch and get to the prompt. Now, even under load, when running Terminal on my old laptop, worst startup was around 10 seconds. It's a little unusual that they picked a terminal emulator that requires several Xfce runtime dependencies, when similar apps like rxvt, aterm, and eterm are available.

Having had enough of the poorly performing LiveCD environment, I decided to give the "Install" icon on the desktop a shot. Maybe it won't behave so badly once installed, right? Double-click.

Fifteen drive-thrashing minutes later, there's still no sign of the installer. Clearly it's trying to load something, but what--oh, look, the screen went blank. It was still backlit, so I'm not sure if it was trying to load a fullscreen installer or a screensaver or what. Wait, wait, wait some more. It never came back up. I put it down as "more retardedness," and decided to hell with this. I powered off the laptop the hard way. Oh well, it's not like there was any data on the hard disk. I wanted to throw the CD-RW across the room, but I still need it for the other distros.

If I'd been manually reinstalling Gentoo, I would have been at least halfway through at this point.

The verdict for Linux Mint: fail. A solid 0 on any scale. Not recommended for any machine, really. Especially not old hardware. Linux Mint 5.0 is currently in beta status, but even if the Fluxbox edition is updated, I doubt I'll ever try it again.

Coming up: PCFluxboxOS, Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, DeLi Linux, and Arch Linux. Stay tuned.