Minimum Hardware that's "somewhat" usable?

[cornholio]

My fiancee' also plays EQ and desires her own showeq box. I've got an old P166Mhz with 128Mb of ram laying around.

Anybody had experience running newer versions of showeq on something this decrepid (I realize it'll take an eternity to compile, but I'm dirt poor heh).

As a side note, I'd REALLY rather not run RH9 on something this slow, any suggestions for a smallish distro with a lite window manager? I figure I could eek out a little showeq performance if I get a really small window manager.

Thanks in advance

[Cryonic]

What's wrong with RH9? Other than the fact that it is now EoL from RH.

You don't have to run KDE or Gnome under RH. I run IceWM with no problems on a P150.

You could also try using FC1 or FC2, just again, don't bother installing the larger WMs (like KDE or Gnome).

[Yueh]

Gentoo is a good choice as well. It allows you to install a minimim set of utilities for your application and optimizes everything to eek out as much performance as possible from the slow processor. The only drawback is that compiling the entire system on a P166 is going to take a couple of days. If that isn't an issue though, it's a good choice.

One thing to note though, some of the older video card drivers don't do blitting which make SEQ VERY slow. Make sure you've got a well supported card. I had a Matrox G450 that would not run the SEQ map larger than about 300x200 pixels. Never did fully figure out why.

[uRit1u2CBBA=]

I just spent about 12 hours getting gnome compiled on a 800mzh machine ... so if you try gentoo, if you compile everything from the ground up, could take as much as week if you don't have any other machines to assist in the compiling "Distributed Computing method".

[Yueh]

Gnome is WAY over the top for a P166. Fvwm works nicely. It could take as long as a week to compile the whole system on a P166 but once it is done it is significantly faster. Least that was my experience. YMMV

It's kinda fun really, sort of like watching the garden grow :)

[fryfrog]

Damn, I have a matrox g450 in my showeq box... and running showeq is miserably slow when anything is going on!

I bought the card cause it was a good, cheap dual monitor one. I should have just gone for a nice supported nvidia one :/

[Yueh]

Yup, I finally gave up and put an even older cheaper Riva TNT card in and it worked fine. Does SEQ speed up when you make the map smaller? Mine acted as if it was hitting a cliff when it got about a certain size. I forget what it was but one pixel smaller, all worked fine, one pixel bigger and X cpu usage went through the roof.

[monklett]

I'm running ShowEQ on a Pentium-133 and it works fine. I used windowmaker and just installed the QT libs, but that was more because the HD is too small (640 megs) for a full KDE install. Running RH7.3.

[Pigeon]

I run ShowEQ on my 200MHz ppro. 64 megs ram. It runs gentoo.

But the monitor I had for it was slowly dying, so I finally just got sick of it and threw it away. I still run ShowEQ on it through x11 forwarding to my sparc.