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.

Comments

FVWM

[VAXman]

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?

Start with X?

[Telastyn]

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.

A few more suggestions

[Otter]

My Linux box at work is a PowerMac 7200/75 MHz that gives me snappier performance than my 1200 MHz Athlon running Mandrake at home. I like the tips here but have a few more suggestions:

• 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.
• Try Gtk only apps. A lot of the utilities like xchat and grip run perfectly happily without Gnome, pointing out just how little you (or me, anyway) need all that hyped communication framework bloat. KDE apps don't cut down nearly as well (I'll leave it to the zealots to argue whether this is a win for KDE's superior integration or GNOME's modularity...) but your old distro will have KDE 1.x which is usable and really fast.
• I must put in a plug for WindowMaker. It's all the desktop I need, whereas the really minimal WMs are too little for me, and still flies.
• I also like Xenon as a text editor. It's lighter weight than Nedit, and is nice if you want a minimal X editor.

re: blackbox

[Xzzy]

> 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.

More usable, and still just as light

[SCHecklerX]

for the Window Manager, use Windowmaker and for the filemanager/pinboard, use Rox Filer.

And whatever you do, DON't run KDE apps!

Re: blackbox

[nuintari]

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.

ctwm

["Zow"]

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"

debian/slack for newbies?

[abe ferlman]

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.

most lightweight graphcial web-browser?

[solferino]

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

Is it me or is this article not exactly useful?

[biglig2]

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.

Debian installation woes.

[saintlupus]

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

I'm happy living in the past

[sunhou]

When I got RedHat 5.0 almost 4 years ago for my laptop, I used fvwm2 with the AnotherLevel macros, which were one of the defaults at the time.

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:

• F5 goes to my chinese xterm with simplified characters window
  
• F6 goes to my main local terminal window
  
• F7 goes to my second local terminal window
  
• F8 goes to my main terminal window which is logged into my office computer
  
• F9 goes to my netscape window (or the next one, if I have multiple ones open, which I always do)
  
• F10 goes to my emacs window
  
• F11 lowers the current window
  
• Ctrl-Shift-F5 goes to my chinese xterm with traditional characters
  
• Ctrl-Shift-F7 goes to my xdvi window
  
• Ctrl-Shift-F8 goes to my gv window
  
• Ctrl-Shift-F9 goes to my xv window
  

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.

very on-topic!

[7-Vodka]

Wow. I've recently had to deal with this in a big way. On vacation. Only computer i can use right now is a p200 toshiba laptop with 32MB of RAM and a 56k pcmcia modem.

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.

Re:there are distros for this purpose

[kaisyain]

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.

Re: Moz doesn't count...

[SCHecklerX]

Try this:

http://freefall.homeip.net/stuff/spellcheck/