Making Fedora a bit faster on old hardware
Disabling Fedora Graphical Boot
The Fedora graphical boot is nice, but it adds about 2 seconds to my boot time (a Pentium III 700 laptop with 256 Mb RAM). To remove the graphical boot, just edit /boot/grub/grub.conf and remove the string rhgb
Disabling unnecessary services
Fedora comes with a tons of services that you wont need. You might consider looking at your current services and disables things that you don't need (or things that you don't regularly need so you can start it up only when you need it). To do this, type setup and select System Services
Changing your Desktop Environment
KDE is heavy, Gnome is lighter but still quite heavy. You should consider XFCE to replace KDE or Gnome. If you are brave enough, you can also use window manager only (not a desktop environment with all its bell and whistles). You can find two window manager at Fedora download site (on extras):
- WindowMaker: Lightweight window manager from GNUStep project, fast, but quite user friendly for me. This is my current default window manager
- fluxbox: A very fast window manager, but not very user friendly (for me at least)
Installing lightweight alternative program
If you only wanted to see the content of some Microsoft Word document, you can install AbiWord, or even catdoc (a command line program). If you wanted to view Microsoft Excel files, you can use gnumeric. For every heavyweight program, usually there are alternatives for that program (may be not in full scale, just enough to do little things quickly).
My tip is: install two or more alternative programs, the heavyweight version is to be used only when necessary (like Open Office for editing or exporting Word document) and the lightweight version is to be used daily.