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Lightweight Window Managers?

Posted by Cliff on from the small-and-useable dept.

bcrowell asks: "We have an old Intel machine (166 Mhz pentium, 32 Mb), previously used only for playing Civilization, on which I've now got Mandrake running. The problem is, it doesn't seem possible to run KDE in this amount of memory. I've heard about Linux being a good way to run serious software gracefully on older hardware, but not having a GUI is pretty limiting, unless you just want a server. Has anyone used a more lightweight window manager that they could recommend? Are there ways of configuring X, KDE, or GNOME so as to cut down on the memory requirements?" Yes, a simple browse of Freshmeat will net you loads of answers, but I'm sure the submittor would appreciate some of your experiences with the numerous choices of WMs, out there.

4 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. Ice Ice Baby by slobberjaws · · Score: 3, Interesting

    my friend had a pentium 100 with 16 megs of ram (recently upgraded to 32) and he had mandrake running on it quite well, for a while he used KDE but he switched to icewm and it seemed to work quite well, it ran at a decent res. and color setting unlike kde. It took me a while to get used to all the right clicking but all in all it was a decent wm

  2. Re:More RAM? by kbyrd · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Some older motheroard/BIOS won't take more than 32MB of RAM. I've got an old HP Pavillion acting as a router. It's got a limit of 32MB. I have no need for a window manager on it though so it runs great!

    KB

  3. BlackBox! by c.r.o.c.o · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I might be a freak, but I use BlackBox on all my computers. From a dual Celeron 466Mhz w/512Mb RAM to a k6 200Mhz w/32Mb RAM. And on my next box, it's still going to be BB.

    It is extremely light wight, extremely simple to configure (I won't call it easy, because it would sound too much like other marketing campaigns). It also accepts WindowMaker and AfterStep dock apps, has a few of its own (pager, etc). This allows you to gain some of the functionality of gnome or kde monitors, etc, without the huge memory footprint.

    It is rock solid. In the year that I have been using it, it has never crashed on me. Mozilla, xmms, quake3, rtcf, and plenty other apps managed to crash my X, but never BB.

    So give it a try, you might like it.

    Another wm I used to use (for 3 years actually) was WindowMaker. It has most of the qualities BlackBox has, but it is a bit bigger memory-wise. And it has a way of placing icons around the border of the desktop that strarted bugging me, and I could never get rid of them. But that wasn't the main reason I switched. I guess after 3 years, I got bored with the same look, and I wanted something different...

    But give it a try too, and pick the best one you like.

  4. Re:More RAM? by bcrowell · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Thanks for the advice, and I'm sure it would be good advice for many people in my shoes. However, this particular machine (IBM Aptiva) is a real pain to buy memory for. When I upgraded to 32 Mb (in order to run Civ CTP ;-), regular generic memory didn't work for some reason, even though it was supposed to work according to specs and standards. After many conversations with a nice IBM tech support guy in Ireland, the conclusion was that IBM-branded memory was what I needed. That was expensive, and at this point, I doubt you can even get the part.

    I suspect this is a fairly common situation: on an old enough machine, upgrading becomes too much of a hassle, and isn't cost-effective either.

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