CTKArch

Hi folks, have an old box with only 512mbs ddr2 on it. Recently took the leap and dove into linux. Amazing what the gnu/linux devs of the world can do with software. Anyway, having an oldish, lowish resource system sent me on a quest to explore all things light weight linux distro. In the search have found some awesome distro's in the nixverse already. Have tried many and some stayed installed cuz just don't want to part with them.

But in the search CTKarch came up as being an ultra-light while still full featured linuxy goodness derivative of arch. Wanted to ask the users who no doubt have the hands on time and experience with the software what kind of resource usage someone can expect while running ctk ? What's ram use and CPU overhead like in general for it ? At boot up, idle ... etc ?

How do the repos stack up in terms of other distro's ? Assuming it uses the same ones and is compatible with those used with arch linux ... or ?

Thanks for any feedback on system overhead. Trying to find one that can dethrone the others. In efficency, user friendliness and performance. In which case ctkarch has its work cut out for it. Though seems like this derivative is mainly the work of one talented dev doing it ? Read a lil of what he had to say here n there around the web. Seems like a nix dev after my own heart. Know I should just go ahead and install it to see for myself if it lives up to the stuff I've come across about it. Thought I'd ask the people who know ... it's userbase, for some input 1st.

look at this post, you'll see the hardware CTKArch users are running...
you don't tell about your CPU, but I think 512Mo is enough to have a speed and efficient system; just you must have at least a pentium 2 cpu because the kernel is compiled for i686.

@wuvnix
Have a look at this screenshot.
I know this is not a low spec machine but it might give you an idea of resource usage with a  few apps running.

houghton.co/isos/?view=./ctkarch/ctkarch-screenshot-15-06-11.png

Typically, I run from 100MB RAM @ idle to 300/400MB RAM with some standard apps running (Firefox, Audacious, etc...)

Of course,with some investigation, you can find the really low resource usage apps...   

Hope this helps.

Repo "compatibility":

ctkarch is. not. a. distribution. The distribution is Arch Linux.

Installing it equals to employing me for a few hours to install arch linux on your computer, with some more packages than the ones you get with a base install, and some vital config files pre-filled.

Well, that's why I made this live-cd installable: I was tired of spending hours each time to make this very install everytime someone asked me to install arch linux on his computer.

Short answer: this is arch linux, so this is the arch linux repos, so… 100% compatibility of the archlinux repositories with the archlinux repositories.


Resource usage:

On systems with huge quantities of RAM, Xorg uses a larger part of it.

When you have something like 512MiB of RAM, at bootup you have ~50MiB occupied on a stock ctkarch install.
Then, resource usage depends on what you run.
Note that Arch Linux is compiled for i686 though, which means that it's faster than distros compiled for i386. (but arch can't run on older CPUs such as AMD-K6)
I was really astonished of the difference (I imagined it wasn't so huge) when comparing pclinuxos with arch linux on my 400MHz laptop.
See the video: calimeroteknik.free.fr/stuff/ctkarch-pclos-400MHz.ogv

If you use midori or arora with not too many tabs, pcmanfm, some little apps like that, you don't need more than ~200MiB of RAM.
If you're using firefox with many tabs and maybe want to run libreoffice, 512MiB is okay, most of the time. It might swap a bit.

Well, you can expect the apps on arch linux to use as much ram as on other distros.
Of course the base desktop in ctkarch's config is lighter than many other ones, so it saves the memory for the apps you run on it.

Thanks guys, appreciate the responses been spacing off so hadn't checked  the ctk forums for awhile.



ctkarch definitely looks like linuxy goodness.