Monday, June 8, 2009

Slackware Current vs. Debian Sid

I have an older laptop which I try to be very respectful of it's limited resources. Since I have alot of respect for both Debian and Slackware, I wanted to see which would provide me with the best results on this laptop. I like to have fairly up to date packages, so I installed Slackware 12.2 and upgraded to current. I also installed Debian Lenny and upgraded to Sid. Both are running on the same machine. I disabled gdm login on Debian so it would boot to a command line prompt. Each were installed with default settings and respective upgrades. I also installed the latest KDE 4 packages in each branch and loaded the same 3 desktop widgets.

Here's the set up.

Laptop
Intel Pentuim M 1.4 Ghz
768 mb RAM
Intel 855 Video card (shared 8 mb RAM)
Asus Motherboard

Results
Boot time grub to login
Slackware 49 Sec
Debian 36 Sec

RAM used at login (no X)
Slackware 161 MB
Debian 77 MB

Time startx to full KDE 4
Slackware 25 Sec
Debian 35 Sec

RAM used at full KDE 4
Slackware 425 MB
Debian 729 MB

If course I'm going to tweak things from the default install and turn off services that I don't use. One final note, I did notice that Debian seems to run pretty hot on this laptop. Maybe I can fix that with some tweaking.

3 comments:

keed said...

good testing..

Unknown said...

what did you end up choosing slackware or debian sid

Jared said...

Arch