[Digikam-users] Best LInux distro for my needs? / Debian in VirtualBox

[Vlado Plaga]

Am Thu, 02 Sep 2010 18:34:18 +0200
schrieb Gerlos <gerlosgm at gmail.com>:

> if you remove things that you don't need, you can
> run any linux distro on that old machine. Just be sure to have at
> least one GB of RAM. You can work with less, but will be a pain.
> I always run latest Digikam with an old Pentium 4 @2.6 GHz with 2 GB
> of RAM and it's good for my needs.

Hey, that's not a slow machine to me! I run digiKam on a PowerPC G4 @1
GHz with 1.5 GB of RAM (a 2003 iMac)... but it is slow, and I'm not even
using RAW images. Still it is very usable for tagging and organizing
images, if I only save metadata to the database instead of to the
images.

Things I usually disable/ uninstall in Ubuntu are apt-xapian-index,
pulseaudio, and strigi desktop search. Otherwise it makes no difference
whether you install Gnome, KDE, and 10,000 other packages or not - as
long as you've got enough hard disk space, and you don't run everything
at once.

> I can confirm that, given a powerful enough machine, you can run any 
> system (such as Kubuntu) in Virtualbox, and it will run quite well.
> You need only to have enough RAM. Think of 1 GB for the guest system
> running digikam and at least 512 MB for the host system.

I think these figures are good estimates. I use VirtualBox on an AMD64
notebook with 2 GB RAM. Such a setup would be much better for digiKam
than an old computer with maybe just 0.5 GB of RAM in total, and a slow
CPU.

With the VirtualBox guest additions installed you can just move your
mouse pointer over the guest window and out of it, to switch between
the systems. But of course the guest can go full screen as well. 

Regards,
Vlado