Recently I decided to get out the old GTA2 Laptop again. Why GTA2? Because that was its killer application, as it only features a 600 Mhz Intel Celeron, some on-board graphics card and 64 MB of RAM. This game runs pretty well while being very much fun, especially the LAN mode is just awesome. If you never played GTA2 yet, here’s a multiplayer gameplay video I just googled up. Also the game became freeware, so if you like it download it!
But let’s get to the point of the article. I have always played with the thought of installing (any) Linux on this notebook, until yesterday it was running a very nlited Windows XP. So I finally decided to throw that off the about 5 GB harddrive and give arch a shot. Why did I choose Arch and not lets say Debian? The later one compiles x86 packages for i386, but archlinux compiles to i686, which is less backward compatible, but a bit faster. Plus the other reasons why I just love archlinux – simple configuration, pacman and yaourt, aur and so on.
While downloading the lastest snapshot for i686, I browsed a bit around and came across this thread from which I used their suggestions to add lowmem to the kernel line as well as setting ramdisk to 20% (also kernel line in grub). Then /arch/setup worked out pretty good, just like any installation. It was a bit slower of course, but I didn’t expect it to behave different.
Suprisingly WLAN actually worked with ndiswrapper, I was not sure about that at all. This laptop has a T-Com Sinus 154 Card, I took the windows driver from the installation CD. The next not-so-clear-thing was setting up xorg without nvidia (I’m used to do it with that), but after I found hwd, it worked out fine.
lxpanel displays the CPU usage at the bottom right corner
To get decent performance, only lightweight and fast software would work. As WM I chose openbox with the lxpanel. The browser with the best performance after text browsers is propably dillo. But dillo can’t even display common websites like wikipedia and google right, because its CSS implementation has just started. Even worse, javascript does not work at all, so sadly half the web does not work. If you just want to do some quick research, it is enough though, so I kept it installed. Firefox was slow as hell, just the experience I had using it with windows XP. Because of that I tried some alternative browsers. Chromium (the opensource project behind Google Chrome without the spyware) just segfaulted, so I tried the closed source Opera (10). Yaourt -Ss opera lead me to opera-snapshot from the archlinuxfr repository, which was actually pretty fast. In every other case, it would have been Firefox. But as this was just a matter of speed, Opera took the cake.
QMPDClient open
Other software I installed is mpd, mpc and for the first time QMPDClient as GUI. Mpd is very lightweight and can be used without a X server, just like unix tools should behave. I chose the said graphical user interface, because it is not written in script-languages like python or perl, but in c++ which not only has less dependencies, but also brings more speed. In fact, I have nothing python or perl related installed on this machine.
desktop pc: copying music from within amarok to my laptop
Another pick was OpenSSH and SSHFS over nfs and samba. Why? Because nfs did not work at all and samba plus its dependencies was about 100 megabytes. When I mounted my laptop’s music folder on my desktop computer, I was able to fill it from within amarok via drag and drop, just like any mp3 player, which is quite useful 
Other applications I installed and tested were pidgin, codeblocks and lbreakout2. For pidgin, I think BitlBee plus something like xchat would be the better choice, but I have not tried that yet. It was usable though, as well as codeblocks and lbreakout2 were. What I did not try yet is GTA2 (with wine), but I will likely do that.
No desktop icons, no wallpaper
Software I did not install on purpose: A program that displays a wallpaper and/or desktop icons and a file manager. These are just too wasteful for that little system.
Update: As expected, GTA2 is not playable at all. The wine-layer is just slowing it down too much, and while epsxe offers more tweaking, it is not faster. On the other hand, I’ve got bitlbee with the otr patch running. Bitlbee is a fake IRC server which displays contacts from other IM networks that all IRC programs can connect to. Since I found out that Opera has an integrated IRC client, I don’t even need another program and so I removed pidgin.
Furthermore I did not mention the usage of the Vorbis audio codec yet, which is better known by its file extension ogg. Because they are so small, you can easily fit much music on such a tiny harddrive. Oh and I compile most aur packages from my arch32 environment on my desktop pc. That saves much time.
So in conclusion there’s pretty much you can do with a low-end machine like this. The most exciting feature for me is ssh and ssh-fs. GTA2 does not work anymore, but I have played the single player mode almost through anyway. LBreakout2 works fine and without making the cooler get very loud, like GTA2 used to. Plus now I just have a fully running linux with all its nice CL tools
