The fastest version of Linux.

[javaarmy]

I've got a computer with 64mb of ram and a 700hz (or something similar) cpu and I am wondering which version of Linux might run faster on my computer. Windows98 runs really fast and I kind of want to match this speed. Is there a way to turn off some of the unesecary programs that start up when Linux boots? And also, will making four or five 500mb swap partitions make it any faster?

[Dolda2000]

You won't gain anything on making several swaps, unless they are all on different physical disks; the speed is limited by the disk speed in any case. You probably won't ever need more than one 512 MB swap partition, though.

Shutting down daemons started at boot probably won't make your system any faster. Since they are seldomly active anyway, they will almost always just lie swapped out anyway. The only thing you're likely to gain on it is that your computer will boot faster, but hey, don't turn it off instead. =)

[e1guap0]

I keep hearing Gentoo is the fastest outhere because it installs or you "compile" it to be specific to your hardware. Can't verify this information for you cause I have never installed it my self

[Dolda2000]

CPU speed will most certainly not be a problem anyway. A 700 MHz CPU is more than enough to run even the latest distribution. If there is anything that might be a problem, it would be the RAM, but 64 MBs should be enough as long as you have enough swap space.

Gentoo is (or at least should) be the fastest, yes. It compiles everything you install from source, so you can pass architecture-specific optimization flags to the compiler.

[PA]

If you're planning to run X-Windows, you'll never get it to go as fast as Windows 98 with that much RAM. Windows 98, although crap, is extremely fast!

[Belial]

Actually, if you run it with blackbox or fluxbox you'll probably get a really nice amount of speed.

A friend of mine is running a recompiled version of slack (with specific cflags, etc) and he uses maybe 50mb of his 128mb running xfce, xchat, xmms, gaim, and a browser.

I think you'll be fine as long as you don't expect applications like mozilla or openoffice to run smoothly.

[AshleyJ]

I have just installed RH9 as a new user on a machine with 128Mb of RAM and I am sorry to say that it runs very slowly (see other thread). It would appear that to get any decent performance using X-Windows you need more than the recommended minimum.