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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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
have you ever, EVER even run debian??? in the default install you end up on the command line with +/- 30 mb of shit installed. from there you install packages from the net. Its the most functional and non-bloated option around
Sig you!
I don't know how much familiarity you have with Mandrake, but I've been using it as my desktop OS on 3 boxes since 7.1. You've ALWAYS had the option to deinstall most of the bloat during the install, and it even removes the dependencies for you as well! Every time I've installed it (7.1, 7.2, 8.0, and 8.1), I have simply deselected the qt libraries to get rid of all KDE/qt stuff which I don't really have a use for. Then, just deselect gnome-libs and all the GNOME stuff dies too. Now usually I manually re-add gnome-libs and gnome-libs-devel by themseleves so I can run Gnome apps, and still not have all (of what I consider) the bloat of the GNOME and KDE desktops. You can also opt to install using only the install disk (as opposed to the supplemental disks 2 and 3 with 8.1), to further reduce apps.
In the end, an rpm -qa, then an rpm -qi on each "questionable" package helps me to remove packages that don't sound/look after the install.
These distros aren't "killing Linux", they're just doing what they should be doing-- showing new users the wealth of open source and free software programs available with a wonderful free OS. If you don't like the extra crap, then feel free to not install it/deinstall it later.
I'd rather a newbie have more apps to play with, then him get a stripped-down Linux box with no 'fun' programs and having him ask where all the real software is. Linux could use more desktop market share, and more applications with a default install help to fuel that.
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
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
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 :)
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.
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.
While I like IceWM, I really like Sawfish. Lately I have been using Sawfish exclusively. Setup your key bindings, and you can become super productive. I tried blackbox and it just didn't seem right to me. Plus Sawfish is very themable, so you can make it look like E or have windows like Be, Mac, or Windows. There are others that are unique amalgams of setups.
For comfortable familiarity with Windows and lightweight, IceWM wins hands down. If you want Real light weight, Blackbox or Sawfish are real good choices. If you want lots of Eyecandy, then GNOME or E. If you want fast and configurable, then Sawfish again.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
My .xinitrc:
Use an older distro. I suggested this the last time this topic came up here, and generally got flamed for it, but I still think it's worth considering. If you're only running CLI or old style X apps, you may find it a lot easier to use Red Hat 5.0 and add the newer pieces you want than to try to cut one of the newer megadistros down to size. New distros don't even come with stuff like xplaycd or xfm. Just made sure to update for any security holes.
Security - that's just the problem with older, unsupported distributions like rh5.x. There would be so many holes that would have to be plugged that you'd effectively end up with a new distro anyway. That's the best case, assuming you were willing to scour several years worth of bugtraq vulnerabilities and do a lot of manual labour yourself. Why bother with all the hassle, when a newer distro does all the heavy lifting for you?
I've installed Slackware 8 on a few older systems and I'm very impressed with it. Very lean and stable. It gives you good control over the install process, and it's easy to squeeze it onto small hard drives and old computers. And it's new and still supported, meaning that security updates are only a download away.
- 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/
You are aware, of course, that with that much memory you would have no trouble running either GNOME or KDE. That ISN'T a low-end computer by any stretch of the imagination and if you want to see how any of this stuff really stacks up, you need to look at a machine several orders of magnitude older and slower.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
It isn't. If you don't know exactly what's in your box, and you're not an expert -- Even people who would normally be comfortable with a Linux desktop, for the most part, aren't up to ripping apart their computers and scouring the net for the model numbers -- you'll never get your hardware set up properly.
On a box where I don't know the hardware, my first move is to do an install of Mandrake. I write down all the drivers loaded, etc., and then wipe it and install Debian. But, of course, that's not something that a newbie would want or be able to do -- so in their case, they ought to just stick with Mandrake (or Red Hat, or whatever, although IME mandrake has the best hardware detection.)
Are there any of the 'minimal distributions' combined with a good installer that does a decent job of hardware autodetection? I might be convinced to switch to it, if it could get me away from the silly, two-step, annoying dance I have to do.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
(BTW, I ran some Python-based benchmarks the iPAQ and it seems to have horsepower similar to that of a 66-MHz 486.)
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.
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.