Re: [school-discuss] Which is the fastest Desktop distro for schools?

[Cameron Miller <cdmiller@adams.edu>]

Arjun Asthana wrote:
> We are trying to promote Linux in schools. We have tied up with AMD to 
> provide PCs at low costs. 
> We want to find the fastest desktop distro so that the users can feel the 
> value of Linux.
>
> I am in India. And the targeted audience is schools/students/teachers of 
> class 8,9,10,11,12.
>
> The distro neednt have edu software, we will provide this by downloading from 
> the internet, we want a fast booting, fast loading distro with a good GUI and 
> we are not hell bent on KDE/Gnome.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Arjun Asthana
To reduce boot time, compile your own kernel, choose only the hardware 
support you need.  Check into the kernel preemption patches, which are 
supposed to increase desktop application response times.  Turn off all 
the daemons you don't need, removing them from the boot sequence and 
freeing system memory.  At the extreme end you could try Linux BIOS, 
(you would need specific motherboards that work with it).

Use EXT2 instead of EXT3, you lose journaling but gain a lot of speed.

For a fast window manager IceWM or some other small ones are good.

Mandrake comes with i586 and some i686 binaries.  I think Debian still 
uses i386 binaries, (could be wrong).  I don't know about Fedora or 
Slackware binaries these days.

If you want everything optimized, use a compile it yourself distro, like 
Gentoo.  Gentoo uses a BSD like source code package system.

If you need windows support win4lin is the fastest I have seen. 
Launching windows 98 under win4lin takes about a second.  It costs $, 
but so do the windows apps.

- cameron