[Cialug] Lightweight linux for video on imac g4

[Nicolai]

On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 06:42:25PM -0500, Mathew Phillips wrote:
> I recently acquired an imac g4.
> 
> 1 ghz ppc
> 512 mb RAM
> dvd drive
> 17" screen
> 
> It's not really powerful enough to run the newer versions of Ubuntu. I
> installed 10.10 on it this morning and I'm getting 80-90% cpu usage just for
> xorg with no apps running.

Wow, is that normal?  That doesn't sound right to me at all; even on a
600MHz laptop of mine running OpenBSD, CPU usage is far below what you
report when running Xorg and Firefox.  And OpenBSD isn't known for speed.
It sounds like a bunch of unnecessary and/or bloated programs are running.

It would be helpful if you could do a ps aux (or ps elf on Linux?) and
put the output on a webpage somewhere for easy reading.

> I'm thinking about trying to find a 1gig stick of
> ram to boost that a little.

Shouldn't be necessary

> What distro would you guys recommend that's lightweight enough to
> play dvd's and stream tv without hogging up all the cpu on the OS
> itself?

First, you could get some benefit from installing and using blackbox
as your window manager.  It's lightweight and perfect for your needs.

Second, you could compile some of your stuff with diet libc:

  http://www.fefe.de/dietlibc/

That should help some, and every little bit counts.  Plus it's fun to
try new things.

If you could post the output of ps (as above) that would be helpful.

Nicolai