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A Newbie's Guide To A Lo-Fat Linux Desktop
A reader writes:"This article is what I needed a few years ago, when I first started playing with Linux. It's about building a fast and usable desktop using software that doesn't need a squillion horsepower." Good article if you are putting together an older machine to run as a dedicated box, or what to cobble together a terminal with spare parts.
Looking at the average linux user, I don't think lo-fat is in their vocabulary. (or diet)
Michael Loves Me!
I've been wanting to use my old computer for something lately but I thought it would be too slow. I've not thought about using a "lighter" Window Manager for my old Pentium 133 kicking around. It's been a paper weight collecting dust. I've never used Ice or Blackbox before. Anyone have a preference? What are the major differences?
building a low-fat box is a snap. just install a distro which is obviously devoid of bells and whistles. the bloated distros like Red Hat and Mandrake and SUSE look totally retarded next to little powerhouses like slackware and stripped-down debian.
:).
or, if you want a beautiful pure-UNIX box with unbeatable package management and outstanding security, install NetBSD (my favorite
Good article if you are putting together an older machine to run as a dedicated box, or what to cobble together a terminal with spare parts. Or, if you just want to make your 1.6GHZ totally SCREAM.
problem is, they fixed a lot of fvwm bugs in fvwm2, so fvwm1 still crashes occasionally for me.
the fastest useful windowmanager i can think of is "tvtwm", which is basically twm with virtual screens. window management can't really get much better.
When we talk about machines with low "horsepower", I think we're talking about old pentiums, maybe 486's. Probably not the 8088.
Why not just use FVWM instead of that fancy IceWM or the other new window managers? It's very fast, small, and configurable. I'm running on a 1.2 GHz Athlon / 128 MB, and FVWM works great for me.
Does anybody actually use those silly little file managers? IMHO, they just get in the way - why not just use the command line?
I like blackbox - most of the configuration can be done from a menu and it is very small and simple - and in my opinion, very pretty and elegant looking.
nedit is nice too, but of course I use vim.
*shrug*
Maybe I'm showing signs of age, but I know how much knowing DOS helped me when I moved to win95 as it came out. I knew how to do things, and more importantly how things worked rather than how windows showed it to me.
So when I installed linux (SuSE at first) I benefitted greatly from using just console for a short while (mostly because I couldn't setup X properly, but that's another thing). I learned how things worked in this new system before I encountered window managers that assumed I knew such things.
I certainly understand the need for lightweight WM's for some machines, but for learning purposes the only thing they can provide is maybe Netscape to help files. Of course imo someone should use the system they are comfortable with to browse help, because god knows the easiest way to get frustrated is having to fight with a machine while trying to find help.
i can't use distros like Red Hat or Mandrake these days. they've added so much bloat in the last couple of years that they've removed many of the reasons i fell in love with UNIX in the first place. simplicity has given way to making a desperate attempt at jumping into the desktop market (which is currently estimated at 1%... way to go).
if i wanted 2.6G of eye candy on my hard drive, infesting my core memory and gobbling up CPU time, i'd just install Windows XP. i'm glad there are still distros which value a small footprint.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Where to Get Packages
:). There's been a billion tools to download apps and their dependencies, and Ximian's Red Carpet and APT are two of the best - between the two there's very little software which isn't available packaged to work on a Red Hat box.
/etc/apt/sources.list
You'll find a lot of this stuff is included on the installation cd's of most distro's, or you can follow the links. Wherever possible, these point to the project's homepage, or else to rpmfind's download site. If you're using something other than a RedHat style distro, you may have to backtrack a bit from the rpmfind sites to get the right version.
No offence, but fuck backtracking
Best of all, freshrpms.net is now available via APT. Freshrpms is an invaluable source of this kind of stuff - eg, if you're into DVD, its always up to date with the latest Ogle, Xine, Transcoder and Drip packages. Furthermore, Matthias from Freshrpms does requests: just name the software and he'll package it. He's also a bloody nice guy and writes tutorials on how to package properly too, asking for very little in return. Freshrpms is easily the best Red Hat package source out there.
Anyway, get APT here. Install it, then stick the following in your
rpm http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/apt redhat-7.2-i386/redhat os
rpm http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/apt redhat-updates-7.2/redhat os
rpm http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/apt redhat-extra-7.2/redhat extra
rpm http://apt.freshrpms.net freshrpms/7.2 main
rpm-src http://apt.freshrpms.net freshrpms/7.2 main
rpm-src http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/apt redhat-7.2-i386/redhat os
rpm-src http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/apt redhat-updates-7.2/redhat os
rpm-src http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/apt redhat-extra-7.2/redhat extra
As you probably know, Ximian Gnome including Red Carpet is available from ximian.com. Combined with APT they provide a way to run up to date software on a stable distribution using standard packages, which as far as I know isn't available from anyone but Connectiva, Red Hat, and Polished Linux Distribution.
He forgot a couple of things: the kernel and libs.
Zipslack would probaby be best for this base system. Or a stripped-dopy (minimal install) of Slack or Deb.
I prefer a fat-ho. Here are her measurements:
%packages
@Base
@GNOME
@KDE
@Graphics Manipulation
@DOS/Windows Connectivity
@Mail/WWW/News Tools
@Multimedia Support
@Network Server
@NFS Server
@Network Management Workstation
@Kernel Development
@Emacs
@Utilities
am-utils
(I've seen fatter... don't be ashamed)
Seriously - most sparc machines can be had for pretty cheap these days, and debian is still supported well on them. And debian usually only installs absolutely what you need to survive. Its also nice for older machines like 68k macs and sparc 32 platforms since they usually come with small hard drives.
Hey,
Blackbox is great, but it has been out of development for a while. It is a bit NeXt-ish but super lightweight, and quite attractive. There is current development on the same codebase under "fluxbox". A few guys got tired of waiting for improvements, and just went for it. I love open source... I use fluxbox on my p133 laptop w/ 32 mb of ram, and it works great.
Icewm can be made to look more win32-ish. I have used it on and off, and think it is ok. It seems slower on my system than blackbox or fluxbox.
If you really want minimal, check wmx or aewm++. They are pretty cool, but do not have many features (by design).
For mail, try sylpheed or mutt. sylpheed is a nice gui mail client, mutt is console.
For news try pan, or slrn etc. I use pan exclusively now, as it is acceptably fast and has great features.
rxvt is blindingly fast, as an xterm replacement, and aterm is quick with cool features. i use aterm.
try Feh for images. It is lightweight and powerful. The montage feature is uber hip.
nedit is a good editor, as is kde's kate. Vim always runs quick.
Get mess and mame for games, they are lightweight and run a million old console or arcade roms.
Good luck to you,
Cuchullain
PS: management of your system becomes an issue with slow boxes, try debian with dselect. It seems to kick right along even on my slow boxes.
"If sharing a thing in no way diminishes it, it is not rightly owned if it is not shared." -St. Augustine
What's wrong with DOS?
I think I could give you a much shorter response by listing what's right with DOS:
there's more than one way to do me.
Working in a large ISP environment, I have really learned to love A nice clean FreeBSD install. Anymore I find myself taking a Linux Box (mostly RedHat) and stripping out all the packages and going and rebuilding them the way they should have been. You may also find yourself rebuilding servers with a BSD based system just cause.
In my opinon, you have to try as many UNIXs as you can. get an extra box. Install anything else on it than your normal install. play. repeat. There is more to computing than Linux. I just saw someone get modded down in another thread for mentioning Solaris. Solaris rocks. He got modded cause Solaris aint Linux.
You need the right tool for the right job. Square pegs dont fit in round holes, and so on. Once you do BSD, you will never go back. I have heard of people falling in love with Debian also. YMMV
I'm using it on all of my machines. It is still in development, though, so there are a few quirks, but overall it's very nice.
Now for older boxen ... the best way to make them efficient is to follow the Keep It Simple Silly method of making a working box. Win95-Lite was made for this exact reason ... but that's just if you want win95 ...
For linux I would have to recommend Slackware or Debian ... after a base install you have very little bloat and very few apps that you won't need. Apt makes it real nice to find and install, but slack also has a decent package list to choose from.
You may also want to look into the BSD's ... all of them have a very bland base install and all of them run the latest greatest stuff.
Along with being so great all of these (except slack) offer net installs, so all you need is a disk drive to boot the things up ... so if the CD has crapped out (which it has on many old computers) you can still do a full install on the net.
People are saying FVWM or other things like that ... SawFish and BlackBox were made to be VERY lightweight window managers and like windowmaker are very customizable and since they are so small ... they take up a very small memory foot print.
The thing would also make a cool Home Server, Make it into a router, webserver, email server, and file server ... perfect ...
Lastly ... you could set it up with a VNC client and use it that way as a terminal system. I think the one thing that needs to be realized is that old boxes are far from useless.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
If he is really looking lo-fat, he is kinda screwed.
Nedit is not bad, but a terminal based editor will KILL it for RAM usage. Like vi, or Microemacs, or joe, or even jed.
IceWM is OK, but blackbox is the screamer lightweight favorite Window Manager.
For a file manager use the command line. Or MC - another terminal based utility (GUI utilities chunk out 8-10 MB RAM just for playing).
For graphics viewing, skip ee. Raster is cool and all, but his imlib1.0 sucked for RAM usage. Try imlib2 and ee2, or eog. Either minimzes RAM usage while viewing images. GQview is pretty good, too.
All browsers blow chunks for using RAM, especially konqueror and mozilla. Opera is the clear lo-fat winna. Or lynx, or w3m.
And work on X - hard. Make a beautiful image your desktop background, and give up 20-30 Megs of RAM. Change it to a flat color (xsetroot -solid black) and you gain a lot back. Change X to 16 bit, and/or lose some resolution and you will gain more. I guess it all depends on what compromises you are willing to make. You can always hit Ctrl-Alt-F2 and save even more.
so somebody writes a small page explaining why they like a certain WM over another, some text editor over the other, and so forth, and it gets posted to slashdot?
If I write a paragraph or two saying why Captain Crunch is my favorite cereal, should I submit it? because I can.
let me know.
"when life gets complicated, I like to take a nap in a tree and wait for dinner" - Hobbes.
I currently use Slackware 8.0 on everything from old 386s up to my Athlon 1.2gig workstation at work. It's very easy to customize to one's needs, no graphical interfaces needed for configuration of any part of the OS.
Now that the Slackware forums are down, the only place you can publicly interact with other people using Slackware is in the newsgroups. Hopefully a new online forum will replace the old one. There's also an IRC channel for Slackware on irc.soureforge.net, if memory serves me correctly (#slackware). I haven't been on that irc channel for a while, so it may or may not still be there.
Debian is also a good distro for machines where you are concerned about bloat in the OS. I used it a couple years ago, and liked it.
You'll like Fluxbox!
Hit freshmeat.net and search for Fluxbox. It's a spin-off of Blackbox with a couple twists that a lot of people like.
Why is it that Win9x runs pretty well on something like a 486 but under Linux i have to resort to a WM with much lesser functionality.
Considering the kernel is so lean and fast there must be some problem with X and/or KDE/Gnome.
Can someone explain this? I think something has to be done to take care of this problem.
(No "X sucks" comments without a decent explanation please)
This article is strange for me. While icewm is great choice, I don't understand why he wrote about mtv and xanim. I think that software is bad, very bad.
:-(
Thanks to avifile author we have many free and powerfull players today. Please try mplayer and avifile if you don't know it.
How xanim or binary-only mtv can be better than free alternatives? Last time I checked it was even impossible to rewind a movie there!
XWC as fm? Well, ok, but I preffer emelfm , which is much better than mc for me (try to use mc in directory with 10000 files!).
Last but not least - word processing. What about LyX ? OK, there is kword and abiword, but there are fat. IMHO LyX is much more powerfull than real MS Word, and it's fast and light. The only problem with LyX is xforms
So - it's nice to see that kind of article, but I think choices are not best there.
First you talk about how "bloated" Red Hat and Mandrake is, and then you talk about a "stripped-down Debian"?! Huh? If RH/Mandrake is bloated with its 2 discs, Debian is the king of walruses with its 4 discs! You can easily do the same thing with Mandrake (strip it down, I mean), and you don't have to wade through 10,000 packages for 4 hours.
Zodiac Survey
well, um, so does Linux. Plenty of one-floppy distros with lots of functionality.
If you want a window manager that actually is small and fast, use PWM. /usr/bin/pwm
lets see:
88k
It uses about a meg of ram.
and besides, PWM owns you:)
If you want the fastest leanest desktop, use Blackbox. Nuff said.
> but blackbox is the screamer lightweight favorite
> Window Manager.
Maybe in the current pantheon of "modern" window managers, but it still ranks pretty low against some ancestors.
The fvwm breed, including afterstep 1.0, are immensely easy on the memory (heck I ran as 1.0 just fine on my 486 with four megs of ram all those years ago), and support a greater feature set than blackbox.
BB suffers from a serious case of "my way or no way" from the programmer. The manager is tuned to his tastes strictly and without deviation, which makes it hard to tune things to satisfy.
afterstep 1.0 otoh supports images (bb doesn't), key bindings (bb doesn't without added modules), and when I tested afterstep actually used less memory than bb. bb also does some other odd wheel-reinventings, like the bsetroot command.. why isn't xsetroot good enough? bb also has an odd homegrown config/theme setup, while fvwm and afterstep benefit from a very old and very documented configuration scheme.
Incidentially I did this testing earlier today.. heh, quiet day at work.
Moral of the story being, afterstep 1.0 may be 4-5 years old now but it can still give blackbox a run for it's money.
FVWM is outstanding:
.rc file, which for
-Easy to configure menus and keyboard bindings.
-No clutter at all if you want, or add a bunch
crap if you want.
Its biggest disadvantage is that you need to
configure it by editing a
the majority of linux users will be too hard.
The article suggests Netscape as the best browser for a 32 meg machine (which I guess is what counts as 'low-memory' these days). But if you really want a small but usable browser, try Dillo. It worked beautifully last time I tried it - apart from a problem logging in to Slashdot, which was enough to make me go back to Mozilla :-(.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Linux From Scratch. Not for newbies, but you can make an extremely small distro yourself.
Liberty in your lifetime
If you REALLY want a light-weight, forget about PWM, icewm or even blackbox ...
...
THIS and THIS shows what lightweight REALLY is when it comes to window managers.
All you need, nothing you don't
And whatever you do, DON't run KDE apps!
I didn't see a mention of a good email client (Mozilla doesn't count) And again, he likes kmail?? For a lightweight desktop??? I would highly recommend Sylpheed as a fast, light, easy to use, yet powerful (enough) mail client.
There are so many problems with this article, that I'll stop now, I'm sure the rest of you have already pointed them out (time for me to read the comments now :)
You haven't used PWM have you?
It actually is lightweight and has _features_. Like tabbed windows and the ability to keybind _everything_ to _anything_ else, keyboard or mouse.
Try managing 30+ windows with wmx.
I personally use Mandrake with ROX-Filer and Windowmaker as an environment. It was nice having all of the packages I would normally have to download and compile on my own already included.
Does anyone have links? This icewm looks pretty cool. KDE is nice and pretty, but it's a hog.
Thanks
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
I guess the main reason I likw IceWM is the taskbar and 'start button.' I know it seems lame but I'm used to that setup and it seems to work the best (and fastest) when I'm multitasking. I use MacOS 9 at school and I hate it, it seems too damn clunky in my opinion, and it seems like many Window Managers emulate MacOS in a way. So is there any other WMs like IceWM that don't take a lot of memory. I'm planning to set up a few desktop machines with a P90 and 32MB of ram.
I am the Co-director of the Clermont Northeastern HighSchool Technology Dept. (one hell of a title, eh?)
I had to setup a lab for the middle school using some p1 200's with 32megs of ram.
I used Redhat 7.1 XFS and IceWM.
They are used solely for internet surfing,
and I put Netscape Navigator 4.78 on there.
The CPU usage bar has yet to spike past half way.
I turned off all unneeded services, even Sendmail.
I even decided against using ipchains, because they are already behind a firewall.
Anybody would like to suggest a light weight news
reader for slow connection? When I use windows, I
use free agent. One thing I like about FA is you
can set it to "offline" mode. In this mode, you
connect, download all headers and bodies, disconnect
and read.
I use knode in linux, but knode does
not seem to have this ability.
Thanks,
What's wrong with GEOS?
http://asmo.asmtv.net/files.html
This can even make a C64 useful today.
"Manually configuring PPP is a pain, especially compared to kppp . Setting up kppp can be done in seconds, and this app. alone makes installing KDE worthwhile." ;)
wtf
Smile... tomorrow will be worse.
Yes man, I still use AfterStep, its the only window manager that offers so much configurability, with such a little memory footprint. But I think a lot of people are turned off by the fact that ya have to write the config files by yourself, and there are a ton of them.
But I still wonder what the appeal of the heavy weights is, I can run afterstep on a 25 mhz machine, gnome wants more power than my dual 400 mhz has to offer.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
I can beat that: ctwm, aka Claude's Tab Window Manager. It's a modified version of the vererable TWM to give such modern amenities as virtual desktops, animated gliphs, and the like. I've used it off and on for about 7 years - tried other window managers, but I just keep coming back. It hasn't changed much in that time, but I think that's a good thing: it's stable as a rock - hasn't crashed, hung or gone into a funky state on me once. And it does all this with negliable resources: I used to run it on NCD X-terminals and the like and it ran like a champ. Okay, it started to drag on a Sun 3/60, but what wouldn't? On my modern 1200x1600 24-bit desktop it's using just 1820kB resident, 3204kB total memory, which is on par with tcsh. And since I've logged in 9 hours ago it's used just 23 seconds of time on my 600MHz box (and that's with animated gliphs).
The downside? Someone who isn't used to a traditional X environment will be lost - it's not the place to start someone who just came from Windows, but once you get used to it and customize it for your needs, you just forget that it's there. All the configuration is through a single rc file and the man page documents the options really well. The only downside to its configurability is that there are so many options that it takes a long time to play with them and find what you like.
Oh, and the reason I started using it was that all my friends were sick of TWM (which was the default wm in our CS department back then) so they all started using FVWM. I liked FVWM's features (esp. virtual desktops) and configurability, but I didn't like the overhead (especially since I did end up on X-terminals and old Suns quite a bit), so I searched around and found ctwm.
My 2 cents,
-"Zow"
It's funny you mention slack and debian, because those are the first two distros I tried to install on a 486 I bought expressly for the purpose of playing with linux about two years ago. Guess what happened? It was a disaster. I ran into lots of hardware snags and had no idea what to do.
I started with zipslack since I had a zip drive but not a cdburner at the time. I got it working from the zip drive, but I couldn't get it installed right on the hard drive for some reason that I've since forgotten. Then I broke down and bought the debian box. The installation went ok, even if it was a bit confusing, until we got to XF86Config.
Ye flipping gods, what a nightmare that was. I had no idea how much memory the ancient video card in my $40 486 machine had, hell I couldn't even figure out the model number. And it took me a really long time to find the horizontal and vertical specs for my monitor online.
Someone please do tell me if this is now easier with debian. And in fairness, I was using a very stripped down version of slackware. But, being a newbie, what did I know?
Redhat is better for newbies simply because of the hardware autodetection. I just wish they would install blackbox by default instead of kde/gnome.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Why would you want to put DOS on a 1st generation pentium except to play the games of the day?
I think a light weight GUI like Windowmaker combined with something like XFCE is perfect on these kinds of machines. Dual-booting DOS and linux, OK, but a newbie's experience of the Internet on DOS just isn't as rich as you can get with linux.
Granted I could use microwindows (nano-x) or picogui but nither has a html3 compliant web browser available that weighs in at less than 2meg. does anyone know of a webbrowser out ther that is at least html3.0 compliant and is small-fast? I dont care about java,javascript,flash,whatever. dillo is cool except it's html2 compliant only (center tags and background color not implimented yet.. and I say yet becauseI am sure it will eventually.)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
i've been looking for articles such as this on th web with not much success...
- anyone know of similar articles on th web (lightweight gnu/linux, lightweight computing) or even whole websites dedicated to th subject?
thanks in advance
For those of us who are not complete console monks Nedit really is the perfect solution. While it is fatter than vi etc, the absolute difference is small enough to ignore even on older machines.
You know, for some reason I've been playing with DOS again lately. Now I have a boot floppy and parallel port ethernet adapter that give me telnet, ssh, and ftp on just about any Intel machine. I use MS-DOS, but there are free (beer and at least semi-open) alternatives. There are several browser choices, even at least one GUI one. For some coolness, try DESQView or DESQView/X.
The lack of a spell checker is a HUGE stumbling block for Mozilla. Other than send and receive mail, that is the ONLY feature _I_ really care about in an e-mail client. I was able to hack in the netscape spell checker into an earlier build, but that did not work in the last couple revs. Digging in deeper it looks like Netscape did/can't release that due to 3rd party problems. Got more info and it might be possible to use ispell or pspell, but seems know one knows if they can use it based on licenses or compatiblity issues. Moz will be at 1.0 long before I could puzzle out from ground zero how to add to the codebase (in a positive manner), but it looks like there is a vaccum there for someone to lead a team - expecially us mozilla newbies wanting to help.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Are you saying these pants make me look fat?
HowTo Build a Minimal Linux System from Source Code
/dev/hdd1 I'll be a happy little linuxer
Linux from Scratch
Now if someone can tell me why programs (so far MAKEDEV and Lilo) won't run from
harddrive
'Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson...'
- check out tinyX ( included in 4.1 distro ) as a low cal XServer.
- check dillo for a browser ( dillo.sf.net )
- fluxbox ( fluxbox.sf.net ) is an improved blackbox
- As an editor check jove or jed ( or even emacs21 which boots much faster than previous version imho )
- avoid kde / gnome. stick with just gtk apps.
- maybe check xwd ( search google ) as a nice gtk mac like file manager.
- Also custom build your kernel to use less ram, maybe drop the number of ttys, kill uneeded services, use rxvt/aterm rather than xterm.
Have some pride, people.
Using a stripped-down desktop because your box doesn't have enough horsepower is like ripping the back seats out of your Mustang instead of putting in a Paxton Novi 2000 supercharger.
Don't take functionality or looks out; stuff horsepower in!
ok, there's always lynx and w3m for lightweight web-browsing
but my question is - what is th most lightweight, free software graphical web-browser out there? - nothing fancy, just functional please
Lets see now, while LoFat's nice... how about this:
:) Infact, I should document this triumph...
20 megs RAM on a Linux 2.4.17 running 486/33 laptop.
640x480 8-bit LCD (Compaq AVGA)
XFree 3.x server
I'm half tempted to recomile Xfree.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
I have a P1 200 (not even mmx) it is now my home lan server. it does
*NAT - shares its modem internet connection on lan
*Samba - It s Win NT Domain Controller which the win boxes have to login in to. so thing like office are run from the server saving space on desktop
*MP3 - stores all our mp3's, jpg, gif n stuff
*NIS/NFS - using NIS, NFS and autoFS u can login to any of the linux boxes and ur home dir is with u
*Apache - nothing major, playing, but if u can guess my ip u'll get apache con grate page (ip changes every 2 hours =)
*X - blackbox wmaker and enlightenment this is just to give and extra box for playing stuff like freeciv, battalia, bzflag (yep bzflag)
(i know enlightenment not light wieght but screen is VGA (640x480) and the way e16 tiles the virtual screen is realy handy)
This old P1 is thus the most used (via lan, as opposed to keyboard) pc on our net, and it does every thing quite happily.
It running Debian GNU/Linux Woody. Kernel 2.4.10.
Now imagine doing all that w/ an MS Win NT OS (or 9x). you'll be lucky if it boots up and is even slightly responsive, never mind trying to run all those above mentioned services.
-Trevelyan
Is how to change your default window manager and stop GNOME from loading etc. These things are probably covered elsewhere, but they would have been appropriate here. I would like to prevent GNOME from starting up on my RedHat box, and to add a few things to my X startup (xmodmap) but I don't use that machine often enough to bother figuring out how. I know how to change my setup on Debian (my main machine) by editing .xsession, but on my RedHat box I have no clue.
Why the hell do you need a spell-checker? Can you not afford a dictionary or something?
Berto
I've tried both of those. Moving a window across the screen feels like hauling around a slab of granite due to the shaped borders. Try the same thing in IceWM and it's nice and smooth and fast.
I could probably live with the slowness, but the complete lack of features really turned me off.
- ROX-Filer for the file manager. It manages desktop icons, and has a panel as well if you want one. It's based on Gtk+, but doens't involove any gnome.
- Oroborus for the window manager. It's default theme is beautiful and it is amazingly quick. Uses only xlib for drawing.
- FSPanel, for F*ing Small Panel. The whole app is only 10k under linux! Plus it works and includes a pager (optional patch).
On my box it takes about 2 seconds to fully load everything! how's that for performance. KDE 2.1.0 took close to a minute to load.rox.sf.net
www.kensden.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Oroborus/
www.chatjunkies.org/fspanel/
Flame on!
"use GIMP for image editing"? Thanks guys, would never have thought of that one. Better yet: "install KDE even if you don';t use it as the apps are good"
Look, I found in the back of my dead machine closet an old 386 laptop (woo, way back) and I want to set it up for my brother to encourage him to not email me instead of not calling, so I need a really low-fat linux. Whats the advice there? No PCMCIA or CD-ROM and about 4Mb of RAM, so KDE is out. Suspect X might be too. I'm going to try debian via floppy and fake a PPP connection via COM1 into my LAN for apt-get goodness.
Also, since when have newbies needed guides to setting up unusual configs? I'm an experienced systems engineer, I run a laptop thats well documented, whose manufacturer puts millions into Linux, and happens to be a model Alan Cox personally owns. Despite all this, I can't get the fecking sound card to work. (It works now, because I wanted to listen to MP3 using it pver the holidays, so I uninstalled Linux and put Win2K on it, which detects and configures and makes work all the hardware out of the box) You have more problems than "newbies can't work out which window manager to put KDE on top of to save on space", people.
That's it, from now on I'm drinking decaf.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
Spoken by someone who can spell, I'm sure....
./ I don't give a rat's ass and just type in the input box... not that I would not use a checker if it had one. I have to spin up VMware _JUST_ for email at this point.
A dictionary only helps if you know you spelled something wrong. One of the things that helped me the most is the real time spell checking in Microsoft Office - it lets me know where I horked something up and lets me correct it.
I use Outlook because it has a spell checker in the office. It is poor form to not check your spelling in the work environment - expecially when I work with customers. Here on
The brower has already won me back over from IE. It's close enough, and mimics most of the DOM that everyone seems to be coding to these days. Is it too much to want something more than pine?
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
If I remember right (I used bb when it first came out, but was more interested in gnome, so I could be wrong here) bb was more or less written by a guy who wanted his own window manager for himself that was really fast, and something to teach him X programming. He was rather adamant about not adding any features to it that weren't absolutely necessary.
Totally agree with you on the afterstep 1.0 stuff though - I was a huge fan back in the day. After they broke the steprc into multiple files it just started getting weird, so I switched back to fvwm.
After I get another hard disk on my sparc perhaps I'll install fvwm again - I kind of miss its simplicity.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
Redmond Linux is supposed to be pretty simple. Haven't installed it just yet, but will pretty soon here.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
I don't know about slackware, but debian does the job admirably. I love it and no it's not really hard to set up.
I really don't quite understand where Debian got its reputation for having such a difficult installer. I mean, sure it's a bit tough for Mom and Dad to puzzle out, but for anyone with any sort of *nix experience its a piece of cake.
And yet, these are the people always bitching about the supposed difficulty.
Hell, look at me; I'm a total newbie to Linux, more of a BSD guy. I decided to try out Debian for the m68k on a wacky old Mac I had lying around, and managed to get everything up and running without too much of a hassle. And if an idiot like me can do that on a weird hardware platform (Q950 Mac with the SCSI problems) and an OS that he doesn't understand, anyone savvy enough to have heard of Debian ought to be able to pull it off.
--saint
Now, on my latest desktop machines, I still use the same setup (although on a newer version of Linux). I had to copy over my old startup files to get the newer RedHat to fire up a desktop that looks like what I was used to. I also use this on a couple of 486's I have.
With this setup, I get multiple screens if I want, a very thin title bar at the bottom (so it doesn't take up much real estate, very important to me), and I have programmed various function key combinations to warp to (and bring to the foreground) the various windows I use:
The sysadmin in my dept laughed when I told him about all that, but a few days later he told me he'd done the same thing, mapping a zillion function keys. Once you use them a bit and remember them, it's so much faster than the mouse (and he probably has about as much aversion to the mouse as I do).
I tried to do all this function key mapping under Gnome a year or two ago, but couldn't figure out how to do it, so I gave up on it. Anyway, the stuff I do works fine under fvwm2 / Another Level, so there's nothing driving me to switch.
If you use wmx properly, it is easy to use. Just drag your windows off the right side with the tabs showing. (I do not know about 30+ windows---I worked with a programmer who was fired because he was always hogging the fucking box with twenty-some windows open)
? That way it would take up twice as much space.
You may also want to look into the BSD's ... all of them have a very bland base install and all of them run the latest greatest stuff.
I ran my server (blue.roadflares.org) for months handing HTTP and SMTP for my domain on a 230 meg hard drive in a Quadra 700.
That's ancient, to those of you who don't use Macs. Roughly equivalent to a low end 486.
The operating system? NetBSD.
If you've got _seriously_ old hardware, like that Quadra, or the 486 that's serving roadflares.org now, or the IPC I've got here, try Net or Open BSD. They run like champs.
--saint
For example, I type ctrl-alt-t and I get a terminal (rxvt -fg green -bg black +sb --geometry 80x50). Or I can hit ctrl-alt-r for a run dialogue.
If I want to dial the net I hit ctrl-alt-UP. (rxvt -fg green -bg black +sb -geometry 50x8 -e
If I want to dial down, I hit ctrl-alt-DOWN. (killall ppp)
My dock looks pretty attractive too with WmCalClock (/usr/ports/x11-clocks/wmcalclock). If I double click it, I get jpilot.
Below that is wmfire (/usr/ports/sysutils/wmfire) for eye candy / system load. Then comes my mixer, wmmixer (/usr/ports/audio/wmmixer), and XMMS (/usr/ports/audio/xmms).
With a little bit of playing with the menus (the drag and drop menu configuration is great) you can organize your programs quite easily.
Hope any of this is useful.
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
I installed suse 7.3 on my sparc 5 today, lets just say 3 hours later, KDE took 5 minutes to load, control panel also takes 5 minutes to load. OUCH!
Back to Icewm, and at least its some what snappier.
Side note, my sun blade 100 kept puking at random points of the suse install, that box will scream with kde when the linux is fully ported. BTW, damn it sun, support the creator 3d elite!
I just talked to someone today that was looking for something just like this. He ended up ordering debian 2.2r4 from http://www.lsl.com . And was going to take it from there.
I think that the disro that is choosen is always going to end up being a dead end thread. Most of them have a form of package management that work well.
But here is the rub: The people who need something fast and small for older computers generally also need the management tools that comes with larger installs like kde or gnome.
The filemanager he mentions seems to be bitroting. Can anyone recommend a windows explorer style file manager for X that I don't have to worry about eating my files? I just searched through freshmeat's 190 matches for "file manager", and found only one file manager that looked usable... and it was binary only.
I normally don't care for such a thing. I get along fine with mv, bash/zsh's advanced replacements (for file in *.fred; do mv $file ${file%.fred}.barney; done), and a little perl script I cooked up to do regexp renaming (remv). But occasionally a certain file management task comes along that leaves me begging for explorer.exe, and its in place edit, and its quick multifile selection that doesn't choke on quotes and spaces.
Anything out there for me?
Since computers are there to compute and make my life easier by doing repetitive or tedious tasks for me, why the hell would I want a dictionary when my computer will spell check a WHOLE DOCUMENT (if your a bad speller this could save hours), with a click. Can you not afford a computer or something?
I use this set up as a lo-cal Linux setup on my Thinkpad, a Pentium 133 32 megs of RAM: Xfce is my desktop. Kinda CDE ish but it is fast, has built in GNOME support and functional file browser. AbiWord for word processing. I don't use spreadsheets that much so I go with Gnumeric if I do. Mozilla is my browser. Postillion for mail, along with pine. The GIMP, of course. I don't play alot of games so there is only a pac-man clone, space invaders, and of couse, Doom. All this runs really well.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
"I think it would be fine if everyone could agree on a uniformed standard for linux, and then progress from there. But then linux would become another windows and taht's the last thing we want."
Not were world dominations concerned.
For a file manager, XFtree, which comes as part of XFce, is increadable. You will not believe what it can do. And if you need any kind of connection to a WinXX network, XFsamba is increadable. There is no better Samba tool. Period. rox is good too, though.
Dillo was mentioned and it is worth having a look at. It's very usable if you don't need frame support.
Someone mentioned running text based tools as an option. I would have to say that the #1 file manager I use is mc in an xterm. And links in an xterm does great for web stuff.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
fvwm2... perfection
The court was tired of recounts, and demonstrated how to take care of it.
First thing I did was clear some room and d/l some floppy images and install debian ( for the first time! )
Anyway, i'm used to kde. so I apt-get kde. When i boot into it UGH! it's slower than any computer i've ever used before!
The big problem is the hard disk. I would wager it's slower than that of most 386's. It's CRAP. If the swap fills up more than 10MB that's it. it immediately begins to crawl slower than a slug over the salt plains.
I had to apt-get blackbox and give that a go. It worked a charm. But, still a little disheartened by konqueror, which as it turns out, is more ram hungry than IE5, I decided to find another web browser. I found Dillo! Dillo is awesome. It's got some problems rendering and doesnt support any advanced features, but what do you want for 97k? I've been using it ever since. Even with several windows open it doesn't even touch swap!
I also found that gtk programs like gaim are much less resource intensive than their kde equivalents.
on a side note. Debian is awesome. My jaw dropped when i started using apt-get. Also, the distro seems very well put together. I love the little touches like the menu program which controls menus in all the WMs and DEs. Just using debian on this laptop has already made me vow to switch away from mandrake when i get back to my normal box. It's very weird that a distribution put together by volunteers has turned out to be my favourite, I've tried many others before sticking with mandrake because it's what i give out to my friends.
Another side note. Although i hate windows, win95 actually runs quite well on this machine. It's crap but it's lean i guess.
Liberty.
Every Developer should read this list aloud to themselves 20 to 100 times a day and live as if it were immutable law. If they did, the idea of linux gaining a noticable share of the consumer market would be much closer to reality.
JFMILLER
p.s. for those of you who will claim that Linux is only for those who can figure out how to use it, I say to you, "You are not numerous enought to be signifacant in any world but your own"
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
One of my latest worries 'bout using Linux is keeping track of what programs I am (or am not) using in my computer. How do I know what versions of whatever programs am I using? How about libraries? I know Gnucash requires the latest in everything, but that requires major upgrading software-wise - what if every "cool" Linux app has to be like that?
/usr/local/bin, /usr/bin or otherwise.
Even better, how about a more... easy-to-understand-for-Joe-Schlub kind of listing for programs to be used by me? Win98 has on default "Program Files," and most installation programs *assume* stuff is going to installed there. However, I'm too dumb to know what is
And I still worry about having older versions of anything at all making a security risk.
No, I will not subject myself to using package formats. I want things to still be compiled to the best of their ability to be fitting with my computer.
http://freefall.homeip.net/stuff/spellcheck/
Enlightenment (yes, I can run E without Gnome or any other other desktop for that matter on top). Themes for E, I think, are visually very appealing compared to IceWM. E doesn't have a taskbar like IceWM, you really have to rely on all your mouse buttons (left, middle and right) for app menus to pop-up. But I like this aspect since it keeps the desktop very clean.
Wordperfect 8.0. There is still wp8 tar.gz files floating around there on the net to install. It's free for personal use and although it's not a full suite like StarOffice or the like, it still is fast and powerful. Because it's an older piece of software, there may be some problems with running it in newer rpm based distros. You'll have to install older glibc libs and ld-configs--they'll take care of that problem.
Although it doesn't quite count as a word processor, LaTeX is well worth the effort to learn! Add this to pybliographer and bibtex and you have a setup that rivals Windows with Word and EndNote any day.
He's right about text editors and user loyalties. I'm just nuts over my emacs (also another piece of software well worth learning).
I used to use Eterm as my terminal, but has been supplanted by his choice, rxvt.
For the web browser, if I can't use lynx, I usually use Netscape 4. Just about all the other browsers can't compare in speed and functionality.
For the mail client, nothing beats Pine. I'm paranoid over all the email viruses being propagated by Outlook and clients similar to it. My motto is, "if it can't be sent as text, then it shouldn't be sent as email."
I don't use KDE--it's too bloated for my system. Although I have Gnome installed, it's really just for the libs to run Gnome software such as gkrellm, gaim and pybliographer.
Linux at home
Saying "the only thing right with DOS is that it fits on a floppy" is not the same as saying "DOS is the only thing that fits on a floppy"...
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
Mandrake 8.1 on my baby. But, just for fun I have a second machine: Pentium 100, 64 Meg RAM, 1 Meg video, 4 gig HD. Dual boot: DOS 3.3 with WFW and MANDRAKE 7.1. Works well for me but YMMV. BTW One reason I did this was to occasionally use the Photon theme ;-) .
1000 SlashDot sigs
In combination with gkrellm, it is absolutely perfect.
Evolution.
Spare me the "...but its an Outlook clone" talk
Aside from it being a ripoff of Outlook it is very nice. I use it at work, and receive email from MANY mailing lists, and apply filters to sort through it all, and it is VERY stable. It is nice to view mailing lists in threaded message view too!
If you can't figure out my address, just drop me an e-mail and I will explain.
If you want some graphics and multiple windows, X11 is actually not that heavy-weight, although Gnome and KDE are. Consider running plain X11 with "twm", "fvwm", or Oroborus. Of those, "twm" is ubiquitous, while oroborus is a little more modern. For minimal graphical web browsing, consider the "dillo" web browser, although it won't work on complex sites. You could also download Opera, although it's commercial.
This article turned me on to icewm, and I've been dl'ing themes, customize, etc. for the last several hours. This is very nice. I like being able to customize everything in a script file rather than through the bloat of kde.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
I've been using LWM for the longest time. It's extremely lightweight, blazing fast, and attractive. Very easy to control the running applications and whatnot. It's too austere for many people but I've grown fond of its speed. linkage
For my family I have three computers configured the same way. They each boot to XDM. From there each family member has a username and password to take them to a blackbox desktop. The program menu consists of the following
Write a Document (which starts AbiWord)
Browse the Web (Galeon)
Listen to Music (XMMS)
Instant Message (Gabber)
Exit (logout)
Also some machines have different hardware so they may also have the following depending on their config
Watch TV (Xawtv)
Watch DVD (Videolan Client)
Also I have a link in the blackbox menu file to each home directory to a personal blackbox menu file (e.g. ~/.bbmenu) which I put programs specific to certain family members (e.g. Play Quake) for my brother.
Also I have the Advanced submenu which includes Xterm and options to change styles and workspace settings.
My family seems to have little problem picking this configuration up.
I can't speak highly enough of Sylpheed. I tested it for use with the X terminals at work. Catted a couple mail backups into one big inbox and imported it into Sylpheed on my 166MHz pentium. 90,701 messages, and Sylpheed didn't even break a sweat.
When Windows 95 was released, a Pentium-133 was the absolute top-of-the-line. It's not a troll to say that for GUI functionality versus weight, Windows beats any X11 setup on a lowend pentium.
(Personally, I never got the Unix GUI thing. I used to make my living with a P-133/112MB/SCSI/Matrox box running NT4 and 5 and it was more than fast enough for everthing except booting and newer games. Now it's a FBSD server and shell box. If I wanted a GUI, I'd put Windows back on the thing.
You do know that you can select what packages you want installed, right? - Things get bloated if *you* choose to do so.
Here's a snippet of info from top(1) after I tried running a few of the "lightweight" window managers mentioned here (btw, thanks to whoever mentioned fluxbox, looks good):
PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE S %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
26154 pete 10 0 3076 3076 1872 S 0.0 0.5 0:01 sawfish
26009 pete 9 0 1872 1872 1332 S 0.0 0.3 0:00 fluxbox
26124 pete 11 0 1816 1816 1260 S 0.0 0.3 0:00 icewm
26059 pete 9 0 1648 1648 1192 S 0.0 0.3 0:00 blackbox
26094 pete 10 0 1528 1528 1012 S 0.0 0.2 0:01 fvwm2
20798 pete 9 0 944 944 808 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 ratpoison
Sorry if that's not terribly readable, but the important figures are SIZE, RSS and SHARE. Note that fvwm2, interestingly enough, appears even slimmer than blackbox (probably partly due to blackbox being written in C++). And, of course, note that ratpoison is significantly slimmer than any of them.
Of course, you may not be the sort of person that would appreciate ratpoison :) - but if you've
used screen(1) and like that, there's a good
chance you'll be able to absorb the ratpoison zen.
If you're the sort of person for whom screen real estate is all-important and you tend to use mainly terminals and a few browser windows, then give it a go - it combines extreme minimalism with useful functionality in a very nice way. No bullshit to get in your way.
Plus, it's the only WM I've ever used that I haven't had to configure at all before being productive with it... of course, that could be partly because there's very little about it to configure... :-)
Pete.
compare to his spec ...
Distro = RH 7.2
My Window manager:WindowMaker 0.65 havent test yet 0.80.x
but i have gnome 1.4.x installed, i just run gnome apps that can run without panel running
File Manager:I dont use file manager
text editor : remained vi
Browser is galeon 1.0.2,
but sometime i run mozilla to test my langpack
it's slow but it's still usable if only 1 browser running, with 2,3 tab
i also install netscape 3, because i miss it..
netscape 4.7x is there just incase i need it.
for nntp, i'm not sure i want to use pan or NS4
email apps: i use pine with fecthmail.
but getting sendmail running is now a good idea..
gfx apps:
gimp 1.2.x run fine on P75 48Mb ram...
-- Hasbullah bin Pit (sebol)
You haven't seen lwm obviously then. It *is* small.
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
...is muLinux. It's small. It's simple. It fits on a single floppy disk. In fact, there's nothing even to install, it can be run entirely in RAMdisks. The base install includes such wonderments as vim (elvis), built in networking, and even fortune.
And it has quite a lot of extra packages (for subsequent floppy disks), such as gcc, emacs, or even X11.
But when it comes to be stripped down, you can't be more stripped than 1.44mb. (Actually, it's a 1.7mb superformat, but who's counting.)
You can check it out here. For those who want to get to know the command line before installing Linux, it's something to consider.
Jake
Dating: while( 1 ){ call_girl(); get_rejected(); drink_40(); } return 0;
prices are relative: $125 is a lot for a piece of shit OS. Period. It's not a lot for a superior OS. Win9x is worth about $10, NT/2k worth about $25. More than that is a lot, but linux, for example, is well worth considerably more than that.
Try out SWM---it's probably the smallest, and was designed with space and processing saving features in mind. If ever there was a WM for embedded devices...
Not intended as a flame, but when did a newbie need a "Good article if you are putting together an older machine to run as a dedicated box, or what to cobble together a terminal with spare parts."?
KDE 1 ROCKS, it even runs on my 486 machine happily!# to secret that kde2 is a bloated slow desktop environment, which in no way compares to the first one. my p2-450mhz/256mb is not even enough for kde2 to run smoothly!!! SHAME FOR YOU, KDE(2) DEVELOPERS!!!?
so does a linux system with a gui(Tiny-X,Microwindows,picogui),webbrowser(lynx) email(pine),TCP/IP stack, pcmcia support, cdrom support, a text editor and a webserver.
try that with a dos floppy.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
mine is fine too!
Windoze not found: (C)heer, (P)arty or (D)ance
wicked!! where can i get those?!?!?
In my experience, KDE and/or GNOME can run decently enough on a 233 mhz system (which was an overclocked 133 mhz). It really depends on the users perspective. Realizing that it runs slower than Windows on the same system due to the fact Linux wasn't designed with a GUI built into the kernel helps a little bit. On a side note, I think GNOME runs significantly faster than KDE under most circumstances -- might be a good choice because KDE seems to have lots of random crashes that can kill the entire X session. Also, any recommendation of Netscape 4.x has to be taken with a grain of salt; even with 4.79, netscape tends to crash randomly, quite frequently, and has no future whatsoever. Any browsers that use moz-embedded might be a good option. Lastly, I see a lot of comments dismissing mainstream distributions because of the bloat "included". The ten disk (I think) debian installation is excellent and you basically use apt-get to obtain the stuff essential for system operation (I never even bothered to learn dselect). One thing to remember with Debian and the dependency twilight zone: You can edit files in /var/lib/dpkg/info (eg. /var/lib/dpkg/info/zlib1g.list) and remove the lines for files conflicting with other packages. That alone solves a lot of the problems encountered.
mwtr / THIS SIG HAS BEEN PRAYED OVER AND MAY BE USED AS A POINT OF CONTACT (ACTS 19:12)
Why use a WM, there all bloated compared to plain old xinit.
Thank you! I never looked at anything but the C++ interface for ispell. Nifty GUI, I'll give it a whirl today.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Windowmaker has been in development for years, and is very stable.
It is also very themable, I used it for years until I installed Linux on a faster computer. KDE 2.2.2 works fine on my PII 333 with lots of RAM so I don't really care about the few MBs. But Windowmaker is real great, it runs just fine on a Pentium 133 with 32 MB!
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
BSD is not Linux...
Granted, tuning is a bit of an art-form. Simple things like changing maxpgio [which should be set to (2*DISKRPM)/3 for single disk desktops] can go a long way. But, taking the time to sit down and build a jumpstart profile that doesn't include things like WBEM, smart card support, and other things that you do not use will go a long way for better performance... why run processes that aren't working for you?
Of course, there is still the CDE problem. I generally put in /etc/dt settings that allow a WindowMaker setup that includes the necessary bits of CDE to run CDE apps, but dump the hoggish dtwm, dtsession, etc, bits. This way, you get full CDE functionality if you need it, but a much more lightweight desktop.
I understand why Sun and most other vendors do this--it saves them a support call when Joe User's Whizzy Bangy Device doesn't work. But shame on the admin that doesn't do his or her job to make the user's desktop work faster...
Get NetBSD! It's installation CD is less than 100 megabytes for i386 !!! There's no bloat there, only the minimum stuff you really need. Then install whatever you want using pkgsrc (like freebsd 'ports'). You go in /usr/pkgsrc/x11/kde2 and type 'make build' for example. Simple...
/usr/src. Type 'make build' and everything will get rebuilt (except the kernel).
The documentation is good and everything is well designed and easy to understand from an administrative point of vue.
After that, you can get the base system, kernel in one neat source tree. You can update the whole thing by anonymous CVS. Then go to
The build process is really well done and never fails. This way, I rebuilt everything using full 'extreme' compiler optimization.
You can fetch patched XFree4.1 source code by CVS. It's in the current (experimental) source tree, not the stable but it works well.
If you have a IDE cdrom writer, avoid FreeBSD: it supports them trough a little burncd command that does not work with every drive. NetBSD supports them through its SCSI->IDE layer like Linux does. This way cdrecord works out of the box. That's why I dumped FreeBSD: they dare to say they're the most PC optimized BSD and they don't even support IDE cdrom writer like linux/netbsd does.
KDE2.2 is available with pkgsrc. But it takes very long (i'd say around 5 hours if not more) to compile even on a Duron 660 with 448 mb of RAM.
Everything you need is surely there. I never had any package dependancy horror story like redhat users have had.
You can also install binary package instead of compiling them.
Realize you'll have to install every app you want. The base OS comes with almost nothing. Such a separation from the OS and apps is good: the OS team can work independantly of package contributors.
Another neat thing with *bsd are the diskslice: This helps saving raw partition. You make a NetBSD partition and inside it, you create slice for the root filesystem and swap (ie: you don't need a raw partition for swapping).
And if one day I decide to use another computing platform, I'll have the same familiar operating system because it runs on just about everything. The source tree has code for all supported platforms.
Briefly, it's pure Unix! I had no crash and no weird problems. And when the 1.5.3 release comes out, I know I'll just need to do a CVS update and a make build !
NetBSD supports Linux binaries just fine: I run RealPlayer and Sun JDK for Linux pretty well.
A satisfied NetBSD who has tried FreeBSD, Slackware and Debian. It makes a nice system to learn stuff and hack around.
This was most interesting and informitive. It is also a great tool to introduce people to Linux and free software. It gives them a real reason to try it.
Please, pretty please, more of this kinds stuph!
This guy is right. If you want to get market share, you do what people want, not what you want.
Try gentoo [gentoo.org]. It is small, and newbs can figure it out (if they bother reading the guides)
:)
The documentation is worth reading even if you don't plan on installing.. they've got a different, laidback approach
> Oroborus for the window manager. It's default theme is beautiful and it is amazingly quick. Uses only xlib for drawing.
> www.kensden.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Oroborus/ [blueyonder.co.uk]
I just took a look at the home page, & read that the developer discontinued his work on this project on 9 September.
A few other software projects on this list appear to either have vanished or be in stasis. I guess interest is fading in writing small, tight code.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
www.microwindows.org, etc.... if you go to www.google.com and search for them you might find them.
It's simple. use that web-browser thingey.. You know, wait until the AOL program says "welcome" and get out to the internet...... very easy...
In fact, contact someone you know that is good at computers and they can show you how to use the internet.
MmmmmmmKay?
The slackware.com forums were taken down because of trolls. There was somewhat of an explanation of what happened over on http://www.userlocal.com.
Basically, trolls started posting Windows registration codes on the board. The board allowed totally anonymous posting, and didn't have very good moderation (if any) controls. I guess Patrick V. felt that having these numbers on the board where everyone could see them might cause him some legal trouble, so he shut the forums down.
There's a very good newsgroup for Slackware. I think it's alt.os.linux.slackware.
I noticed yesterday that the web site is back online as well. I guess someone cracked into the web server and defaced it over Christmas.
"BB suffers from a serious case of 'my way or no way' from the programmer."
Try fluxbox at fluxbox.sourceforge.net.
Checking the full install size of some distros:
Red Hat - 3.5GB
Mandrake - 3.3GB
Debian - 4.6GB
Conectiva - 2.7GB
Slackware - 2GB
I surely do know that all the apps I use do not occupy 3.5 GB in a disk. If you take the basic that everyone uses like... Internet browser, dialer, network tools, email client, word processor, desktop GUI, file manager, spreadsheet, utilities... things that you mostly use, no way you need 2GB of disk.
Hardcore linux argument:
"A Linux comes with loads of applications"
Answer: Have you used absolutely ALL of them?
Hardcore linux argument:
"You can select your installation down to 1GB size"
Answer: Not in a RPM based system. One package requires the other, that requires another one, that requires another completely different thing. No thanks dude.
Yes, Linux distros are way too bloated.
But hold on a second... don't we have a 100GB drive in the market already?
You can have a smaller installation than 94MB, and easily install additional software with apt-get, what more could you ask for?
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
really, come on, only MCSE's use REDHAT!
I have only a 15" monitor. So, let's see what I run. 2.4.4 kernel with alsa sound and ext3fs. I run windowmaker as the window manager. No file "manager". I run GNU screen in a terminal. I use opera with junkbuster (I used to use Netscape 4.76 but opera is more light weight). video playing is out of question, mplayer doesn't cut ice though I *can* watch VCDs okay on Win95. And emacs (not XEmacs) is my default editor. I use mutt for mail. That's light weight for you
On two other systems that I use, I use a very similar configuration (surprise!), except I use galeon for a browser and sylpheed for some of my mail accounts. I don't use KDE or GNOME though I like some of the apps. Gnumeric is actually pretty good. I get all kinds of word documents at mail, antiword does a pretty good job of deciphering them for me.
Thank you for writing "Building a lo-fat Linux Box." I had been considering making a linux system but was afraid of the cost. When I read the artice and the subsequent replies, I discovered that the lo-fat, low-cost linux box was for me.
More significantly, and more exclusively, is the fact that DOS runs on pre-386 computers. Linux does not, not even netBSD will do that.
DOS will run with significantly less than 5 Megs of RAM, Linux tends to have major issues develop somewhere in the range between 3-5 Megs. Of course you might be able to counter that Linux has no trouble accessing over 640K. Touche'.
Well, how about boot time? A DOS floppy boots faster than a Linux floppy. (Not even GNU, just Linux kernel on a floppy). And the shutdown sequence tends to be significantly shorter.
Ohh! Best of all, Much like OpenBSD, DOS is "secure by default". No remote root exploit in the default configuration in over _20_ years! Beat that, you Canadian mountain biker!
Do I have a point? Moderation speaks louder than words! But if you don't have mod points, a reply will suffice.
-castlan
I would reccommend at least 128 MB RAM for new users of linux. It is dirt-cheap right now, and it will make the system run better.
Before the forums were trashed, there was talk about someone starting another Slack forum. As far as I know, nothing became of that. The only place I know of is the alt.os.linux.slackware group mentioned on userlocal.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Where can I find an inexpensive but reliable used pentium for this type of experimentation?