FreeBSD on Dell 8000 laptop

M

mikemoreau

I'm picking up an old Dell 8000 laptop to use basically as a typewriter. I have a nice Asus i7 laptop that I use for my video editing but since it usually has clients' data on it I'm afraid to bring it many places in case it gets lost or damaged.

The laptop I'm picking up currently has WinXP on it but I am not a big fan, I'd prefer something open source. It has an 800 MHhz PIII processor and 128 MB of RAM with a 20 GB hard drive. I'm thinking that should be fine for running something like OpenBox for a bare minimal desktop so I can run FocusWriter for doing my writing.

Thoughts? Anyone installed FreeBSD on one of these laptops before?
 
Does anyone have any real-life experience with running a GUI vs only CLI and how it affects battery life? I know this is an old laptop but I'm hoping that by running a CLI only I'll get more life from the battery than if I was running X.
 
I will have to test it with Ubuntu and report back...FreeBSD is giving me trouble with the install right now, keep randomly powering down the machine. This is trying 9.1, I'm going to try 8.4 later tonight though.
 
mikemoreau said:
Does anyone have any real-life experience with running a GUI vs only CLI and how it affects battery life? I know this is an old laptop but I'm hoping that by running a CLI only I'll get more life from the battery than if I was running X.
Click to expand...

I don't have real numbers to give you, but given that the two things that will more than likely eat up battery life are CPU load and the display, the only way to extend battery life is to keep processes from consuming too much of the processor.

For the display, whether you have a GUI or CLI, since it is LCD, it will be using the same amount of power depending on the brightness you set whether background is black or white.

For the CPU, a GUI might consume more resources, specially the X server if you are running a lot of background processes like widgets, and one also usually runs a browser and does word processing related tasks. So I think a CLI here would save battery life.

That is just my 0.02c.
 
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