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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.
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?
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.
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.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
> 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.
And whatever you do, DON't run KDE apps!
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...
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
Win9x was designed for/on 486s, so were the older WMs.. the newer versions of KDE and Gnome were designed for/on faster machines (like the ones using Windows XP today). You need to relate Gnome/Ximian/KDE to WindowsXP and some of the older window managers to Win9x.
I'll agree with you that alot of these newer linux window managers are too slow, but I think this lies inherent in the nature of linux. There's many ways to do the same thing (take gtk/qt , etc for example) And everything has to be compatible with everything else so naturally programs will take up more ram and run slower (most noticibly in the window manager), but if we're dealing with a uniformed standard where there's only one way to do most things (windows) then alot of functionality is cut off.
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.
__________________________________________
Take comfort in your ignorance.
Grandmaster Plague
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?
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.
I agree. . .I've been using linux [and only linux] on the desktop for about the same time and I didn't know about XWC -- frankly it rocks!
.I had tried everything:
.abiword and gnumeric seem to be the speed winners here.
.and e-mail clients. . .
I had been looking for a good GUI file manager for a long long time (yes, I love CLI but the mouse is faster when moving around 10,000 files). .
* gmc -- decent, slight bloat
* konqueror -- best file mamager but WAY too slow and bloated -- just like the rest of KDE -- I tried EVERYTHING to speed it up -- 686 compilation, objprelink even static linking -- ALWAYS slow!
* Nautilus -- don't even get me started.
* System G -- lacked features
I started to think that it was impossible to have a decent graphical file manager under linux that was fast -- and then this article came up. Nice. The only thing I have to figure out now is how to configure it to use the wheel mouse. . .
It was the same with web browsers until I found Opera:
* konqueror -- decent but slow
* Nautilus -- bloated to hell
* Mozilla -- I've given up with the hope that mozilla will ever be fast.
* galeon -- nice and quick front end, but the [mozilla] rendering still feels like I'm browsing drunk.
* Netscape 4 -- excellent, but crashes or locks up every 10th web page. I had to run gkrellm just to see when netscape was sucking up 100% CPU.
Same, too with office apps. .
* StarOffice -- You need a cray supercomputer and the patience of a monk to run it.
* KOffice -- just like the rest of KDE, good but slow.
* Applixware -- I've yet to 'purchase' it.
. .
* evolution -- the clear winner in functionality, but I just want a GUI mail reader, not somthing that opens 30 processes to manage my life.
* kmail -- slow and doesn't even uderstand IMAP _subscribed_ folders.
* Netscape 4 mail -- excellent, but crashes.
* Mozilla Mail -- just like the rest of mozilla, bloated to hell.
It was nice to see this article on a non-bloated desktop! Hopefully with these comments, this article and some more trial-and-error I'll find more apps to replace my bloated ones.
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.
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.
I use debian and generally like it.
But last time I checked installing apache under debian requires installing libmysql first (explain that one to me). Installing postfix requires installing sasl, ldap, pcre, and mysql libs. Try installing any of the courier suit in a "waist slim" state. Debian wants to install telnetd and inetd out-of-the-box and I can't remove netkit-inetd because netbase depends on it. Samba requires CUPS even though I don't own a printer. CUPS in turn makes me install tiff libraries. I need to install db2 for man and perl but I need db3 for postfix. Vim and links require I have gpm installed even though there is no mouse on the computer.
All this is on a relatively bare bones server. Debian is nice but "waist slim" it is not.
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
...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;
I just saw someone get modded down in another thread for mentioning Solaris. Solaris rocks.
I'm not reluctant to admit that my experience with Solaris might be somewhat limited. I only use it as a desktop on the University, but from that single experience I certainly would never say anything like "Solaris rocks". They have Solaris 8 running on Ultra Sparcs at 500Mhz with 1.25 GB of RAM ans still things seem slow. I got an out-of-memory error while making a very simple movie with Matlab the other day. Mathematica can't happily scroll the view if there are images involved and compiling (java, c, etc.) seems dogslow compared to my Linux box at home. Maybe Solaris does rock, but I sure wouldn't have come to that conclusion from my experience.