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A Newbie's Guide To A Lo-Fat Linux Desktop

Posted by Hemos on from the lean-and-mean dept.

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.

2 of 352 comments (clear)

  1. Why no mention of APT? by Nailer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Where to Get Packages
    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 :). 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.

    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 /etc/apt/sources.list

    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.

  2. Video players, fm and word processing by Jacek+Poplawski · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.