[texhax] LaTeX in old computer

Alan Litchfield alan at alphabyte.co.nz
Thu Feb 1 21:02:18 CET 2007


Tedy,

That is an interesting question. What prompted it? What would you  
consider old/slow?

In the recent past (within the last few years) I was running LaTeX  
(TeXLive) on a P100 running FreeBSD, both with a GUI (X Windowmaker)  
and without. The machine had 32Mb RAM (I think) and a video card with  
1Mb memory on it, which made viewing pdf's slow but dvi's were fine.  
Overall the machine was quite slow by today's standards but there  
were no operational issues with using LaTeX. Most editing was done  
using vi.

I have a Mac Quadra with 32Mb RAM and that has a LaTeX distribution  
on it. Using it seems quite creaky nowadays.

I have previously installed TeXLive onto a 486 and 386 and found the  
performance to be fairly similar the P100 when compiling LaTeX  
documents and displaying dvi's. But on those machines I found I had  
to be quite careful when setting the memory requirements for LaTeX.

Alan

On 1/02/2007, at 3:17 PM, TEDY wrote:


>
> Does anyone in this mailing list have experience running LaTeX or  
> TeX in old machine?
> I just want to know how powerfull LaTeX for making document in low  
> speed processor, or low memory.
> I'm being in process to write a book about LaTeX; in my book I want  
> to show that LaTeX can running well in old computer rather than  
> word processor in the same machine...CMIWW.
> please share your experiences to me.
> thanks for all of yours attention.
>
>
> -- 
> thanks,
>
> Tedy Tirtawidjaja
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