Comments on: Debian on OLPC XO-1

By: Debian on OLPC, take two « Motho ke motho ka botho

Debian on OLPC, take two « Motho ke motho ka botho — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 04:00:01 +0000

[...] old method worked well for me, but required a little effort to get all the pieces in place. I decided to try the new way after I [...]

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 07:53:35 +0000

To be honest, Debian Sarge impresses me quite a bit — I find it to be a fuller alternative to Arch, even if it’s just not as quick. If you want something that’s reasonably fast and doesn’t require a lot of setup, I would go with that. (And the fact that the software is out of date probably won’t bother you. )

I’m not as enthusiastic about later versions of Debian — there’s a lot of weight that seems to have been added after Sarge was finished. You can see the mishmosh of releases in that photo by looking at the repo list; it’s a bunch of stuff with XFCE over top, and it’s acceptably fast.

It doesn’t compare to Arch though. I know it takes more work to set up, but if you want to keep that machine fully usable — and completely up to date — stick with Arch. Take the chance that the updates will confuse it, because there’s still no better option short of a compile-it-yourself distro than Arch. Worse comes to worst, you start over from scratch, and don’t have to set it up again for another year.

By: Andy

Andy — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 02:16:37 +0000

How does Debian compare to Arch for speed? I have an old machine 500MHz 128MB RAM that I am messing with. I have Arch on it and it is fast but difficult for me to maintain. I haven’t updated for 1 year and I bet things break if I try.

I typically use Ubuntu and tried to Ubuntu Lite 0.8 but I would like something even lighter if possible. If I do all your speed tricks with Ubuntu do you think it will be as fast as Arch? Thanks for the blog. I really enjoy reading it.