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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[official] Debian actually comes with about 4000 packages on 3 CDs and you needn't wade through all of them as there is an option to select a thorougly generalized package pre-selection (which can yield basic installations of 40 or so MB).
I haven't used Red Hat since version 4.2 and never Mandrake, but of the distributions I've tried the one thing that seems to remain constant is: your installation won't be bloated unless you want it to be.
When one is on a poor student budget, one buys what one can afford, which is often less than ideal.
The chipset had a logo but not a model number on it (Trident). Given how much I knew at the time, I had no idea that non-3d-accelerated video cards even had on-board memory. And my 28.8k dialup modem access didn't exactly lend itself to quick and easy answers. I was excited and I persevered, but I wouldn't wish my experience on anyone.
None of the specifics matter all that much though- newbies need to be able to boot into a usable interface, they will have plenty of command line hacking and learning ahead of them, but the installation is *not* the correct place for a trial-by-fire learning experience, unless the operating system is specifically designed to scare away the feeble-minded (not a bad goal, but not, imho, the goal of slack or debian).
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
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
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
I see comments similar to these so often anymore. People, take the time to learn kickstart. You really can make RedHat installs as lean as you want them to be. I spent 3 years on Slackware, and 3 years on RH. It's hard to beat Slackware for thin, but you can do some pretty thin setups with RH.
Intelligent Life on Earth