Suggest OS for low end rig

Hello folks. A final update here. It is concluded that the LAN port of the motherboard is really dead. I have installed WinXP (32bit on it), installed the Realtek driver, and Windows still shows cable is unplugged. Sigh.

Again, I wanna wish a million thanks to everyone who have helped me.
Goodbye 2017.

But it worked with another machine connected to that ethernet cable, right?
 
Hello folks. A final update here. It is concluded that the LAN port of the motherboard is really dead. I have installed WinXP (32bit on it), installed the Realtek driver, and Windows still shows cable is unplugged. Sigh.

Again, I wanna wish a million thanks to everyone who have helped me.
Goodbye 2017.

That'll do it. ;)

Time for a cheap NIC, try to make it an Intel one if you can.

Study those terminal commands we supplied you with, it's good to have an understanding of how they work in the event of another issue related to a NIC that isn't physically faulty.
 
I've got a D-Link DFE-520TX (for $4) installed. Ethernet is working great now. Yay.
skylinestar@G31M:~$ lspci -nnk | grep net -A2
03:02.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6105/VT6106S [Rhine-III] [1106:3106] (rev 8b)
Subsystem: D-Link System Inc DFE-520TX Fast Ethernet PCI Adapter [1186:1405]
Kernel driver in use: via-rhine
Kernel modules: via_rhine
 
Testing Lubuntu 17.10. I'm surprised at the ram usage.
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What's the difference between zram and zswap?

Zram is a compressed swap device. (replacing your disc swap) Its basically a RAM swap drive.

Zswap is a compressed cache but doesn't replace your disc swap. Its an in kernel compression... basically it just means the system will compress some stuff it puts in ram and should better use your memory. It does come at the expense of a bit more CPU... but if your talking webpages ect that shouldn't be a big deal even on old or low end hardware. If you set it up the default is LZO compression which is the opposite of Zram which defaults to LZ4. All you really need to know is LZO is a better compression method, which makes it slower to compress and deflate. So in general I would suggest using LZ4 which takes less CPU but still provides almost as good a compression ratio. (which I would assume why the article I linked suggests turning on LZ4... if you skip that step Zswap will use the default LZO more compression at the cost of more CPU)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zswap
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram

In general imo Zswap is superior. Chromebooks tend to ship with zram on... and If you really don't wanna hit the hard drive or slow ass flash storage in a chromebook if you can help it that makes sense. I would say in most cases zswap is the way to go. It can more intelligently handle page compression and will choose for instance to not compress stuff that doesn't compress well.
 
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Added GeForce GT 440
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What's the meaning of "Total dedicated memory"? Why is it less than 1024?
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Replaced my 2x 1GB 6-6-6-12 ram with 2x 2GB 6-6-6-18 ram ($10 from AliExpress). Run systemd-analyze...

Before (2x1GB):
Startup finished in 6.103s (kernel) + 55.161s (userspace) = 1min 1.264s
graphical.target reached after 22.527s in userspace

After (2x2GB):
Startup finished in 6.434s (kernel) + 22.138s (userspace) = 28.572s
graphical.target reached after 22.124s in userspace
 
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70mm fan, here I come:
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Ran s-tui stress for 5 minutes. CPU temperature is 55°c with room ambient at 32°c
 
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