Which gui for slow (133 Mhz) pc

[Alex Martelli]

Francesco S. wrote:
        ...
>>> What gui can you recommend for my slow pc (win95).
        ...
> Maybe I have to buy a new computer, this will be the best solution.

Yes.  Not sure about Austria, but around here in Italy you
can get used PC's that run rings around yours for 250-300 euros.

Meanwhile a Pentium-133 with halfway decent RAM is (a bit of
overkill, but OK) fine for such tasks as a dedicated router,
firewall and proxy/masquerader for a LAN.  My home workplace
has grown to 5 desktop PC's, plus three laptops occasionally on,
with 10/100 Ethernet w. switches among them and ADSL to the
world (with ISDN on autodial as a backup should the ADSL ever
go down).  At the center sits a Pentium-90 running OpenBSD 3
with only one optional piece of software... Python, of course.
It handles all of the networking, proxying, firewalling, etc,
and talks to the ADSN router on a physically separate Ethernet.

The trick is that the old, VERY old Pentium-90 PC has no
graphics installed AT ALL.  Not even a monitor (nor kbd, nor
mouse) -- I just ssh in for occasional maintenance, but
there's not much need of that... for this kind of load,
OpenBSD 3 can be installed to do everything on its own, with
a little tiny help from a few strategic Python scripts.

Of course, my "home central server" PC is not powerful enough
to run Win-95, by any means.  It IS by far enough to do just
about anything else I need from it, though.  I've even toyed
with running Squid there for a while, for example, though my
family's usage patterns are such that it was no benefit, so I
took it down again.


Alex