Yeah, I have thought about it. Not Lubuntu maybe, but Xubuntu. But it just seems that even though this machine isn't the most powerful by any stretch, it should be up to running this. I am not trying to be argumentative with you, but if the machine was that underpowered, I would think that the machine would be hosed from the git-go. But it will run and seem to be perfectly normal for a few minutes and then ka-bloowey.
I started it up about 10-15 minutes ago and it still seems to be ok. I have been playing around with the settings so MAYbe I just hit the right combo, but time will tell. Looking at the system monitor I see the graph for the two cpu's going all over the place, but there does seem to be a cycle to the movements that corresponds roughly to the memory/swap usage, and the network usage. As for the memory/swap graphs, the swap is zero activity. The memory usage is regular in that it will start at about 20% utilization and be there for about 15 seconds or so, then over the next 8-10 seconds or so it will stairstep up to about 80%, remain there for about 6-7 seconds, and then drop back to 20%. Then the cylce will start over again. The network utilization graphs for the most part look more like a sine wave running from near 0 to around 4Mbps (BITS per second, not bytes). At times it will jump to about 20Mbps for 10-15 seconds two or three times over about 30 seconds, and then go back to sinewave.
My primary machine is a I-7 processor with 6GB ram ,1TB esata disk drive and runing Ubuntu 12.04. I can't stand Unity so I am using gnome-session-fallback for the desktop. On this machine I have installed Virtualbox and created a Ubuntu 13.04 guest (meaning Unity desktop) and I have installed nZEDb there too. To that machine I have allocated as little as one processor and 1GB ram, and although it was awfully slow, it ran. I could run nZEDb, SABnzbd+, SickBeard, and CouchPotato, and still use the machine. It was painfully slow, like it would take 10-15 seconds just to minimize a window, but I was always able to at least manipulate the vm. I increased the cpu count to 2, and the ram to 2GB and while still somewhat slow it is acceptable for what it is. I would think that a dedicated machine, even though it is an older Core2 but has more RAM should at least be able to do as well. The only software differences between the two is really Unity vs Gnome.
So you may be asking why I want to run it on this old machine in the first place since I have a running copy in a vm. Well, . . . why not? It is a machine that has just been sitting unused for a while, and it would allow me to "unburden" my primary machine so I could burden it with something else.
Anyway, Any suggestions would be appreciated as long as you aren't telling me to go out and buy a big new machine. :-)
Thanks,
X
EDIT: Well, it ran for around an hour this time before going kablooey. Unfortunately, the monitor had gone into standby mode and I could not get it to come alive again even after 30 minutes of trying so I don't know what the system monitor would have told me. When I pressed the ctl key, the monitor did come back online (meaning that the power led changed from yellow back to green), but remained black except for the cursor.
EDIT2: Well the screen finally came back on after another half hour. The system monitor showed that the network graphs had both gone to zero (send and receive), the cpu utilizations dropped to around 10% or less, but the memory usage went to 100% and the swap rose to around 75% and looks like it was slowly climbing. Since the system monitor stopped updating at that point, and the system is just unresponsive, I can't switch over to see what the processes were doing,
