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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.
Looking at the average linux user, I don't think lo-fat is in their vocabulary. (or diet)
Michael Loves Me!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Blackbox is VERY lightweight. It looks fast, is somewhat customizable. GREAT on a box with limited RAM (but not as good as dropping 24 bit color for 16 bit color).
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.
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
What's wrong with DOS?
I think I could give you a much shorter response by listing what's right with DOS:
there's more than one way to do me.
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
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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.
We all know that Captain Crunch is bloatware, loaded with features no one needs. "oops...all berries!" comes to mind. Choosing a distro (peanut butter, plain, crunchberries) is getting more and more difficult; it won't be long before we have dozens of varieties to choose from.
Real me use cheerios and like it. No frills, but you get a nutritious breakfast.
there's more than one way to do me.
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.
> 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.
The article suggests Netscape as the best browser for a 32 meg machine (which I guess is what counts as 'low-memory' these days). But if you really want a small but usable browser, try Dillo. It worked beautifully last time I tried it - apart from a problem logging in to Slashdot, which was enough to make me go back to Mozilla :-(.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
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!
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
And whatever you do, DON't run KDE apps!
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 personally use Mandrake with ROX-Filer and Windowmaker as an environment. It was nice having all of the packages I would normally have to download and compile on my own already included.
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.
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.
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...
Granted I could use microwindows (nano-x) or picogui but nither has a html3 compliant web browser available that weighs in at less than 2meg. does anyone know of a webbrowser out ther that is at least html3.0 compliant and is small-fast? I dont care about java,javascript,flash,whatever. dillo is cool except it's html2 compliant only (center tags and background color not implimented yet.. and I say yet becauseI am sure it will eventually.)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
i've been looking for articles such as this on th web with not much success...
- anyone know of similar articles on th web (lightweight gnu/linux, lightweight computing) or even whole websites dedicated to th subject?
thanks in advance
You know, for some reason I've been playing with DOS again lately. Now I have a boot floppy and parallel port ethernet adapter that give me telnet, ssh, and ftp on just about any Intel machine. I use MS-DOS, but there are free (beer and at least semi-open) alternatives. There are several browser choices, even at least one GUI one. For some coolness, try DESQView or DESQView/X.
The lack of a spell checker is a HUGE stumbling block for Mozilla. Other than send and receive mail, that is the ONLY feature _I_ really care about in an e-mail client. I was able to hack in the netscape spell checker into an earlier build, but that did not work in the last couple revs. Digging in deeper it looks like Netscape did/can't release that due to 3rd party problems. Got more info and it might be possible to use ispell or pspell, but seems know one knows if they can use it based on licenses or compatiblity issues. Moz will be at 1.0 long before I could puzzle out from ground zero how to add to the codebase (in a positive manner), but it looks like there is a vaccum there for someone to lead a team - expecially us mozilla newbies wanting to help.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
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...'
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
You can always run a "business" and allow trade in's for store credit. That way you can get a lot of decent legacy hardware, have some spare parts for yourself and charge $100AU to the next guy who wants EDO to put in his legacy boxen.
http://cincyboys.blogspot.com/ Everything Cincinnati. Including the word 'Finnih'
Lets see now, while LoFat's nice... how about this:
:) Infact, I should document this triumph...
20 megs RAM on a Linux 2.4.17 running 486/33 laptop.
640x480 8-bit LCD (Compaq AVGA)
XFree 3.x server
I'm half tempted to recomile Xfree.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
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
>Using a stripped-down desktop because your box
>doesn't have enough horsepower is like ripping
>the back seats out of your Mustang instead of
>putting in a Paxton Novi 2000 supercharger.
Saying that is akin to saying we should send the 86 Jetta to the crusher because it isn't an 02 Passat.
In this case, it's like saying we should send the
67 convertible bug to the crusher.
I have a toshiba laptop that has taken many beatings and continues to be my primary travelling machine -- new dells and even a new toshiba have failed to meet my requirements of
battery life off the AC and resilience to abuse.
Are you saying I shouldn't bother trying to streamline the linux installation that's on there because it doesn't match your own agenda? Or are you trying to imply that it's an equal proposition for me to acquire some titanium cased
gigahertz notebook to replace the old toshiba that
would not die? If so, I'll let you know where to forward the check, or better yet, just ship me my new notebook. By the way, if you have a 64-65 mustang with or without back seats, send it to AZ care of me.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
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
Windowmaker rocks. I'm just sorry people don't really pay attention to it anymore, as it's fairly intuitive, and has a set of tools surrounding it that make it as easy to administer as, say, GNOME. Really.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
My .xinitrc:
Saying that is akin to saying we should send the 86 Jetta to the crusher because it isn't an 02 Passat.
:-)
No, exactly the opposite; it's saying that we should stick a better engine or a supercharger or dual exhaust and a bigger throttle body on that Jetta, instead of trying to make it faster by removing the bumpers and back seat to decrease the weight.
I have a toshiba laptop that has taken many beatings and continues to be my primary travelling machine -- new dells and even a new toshiba have failed to meet my requirements of
battery life off the AC and resilience to abuse.
And I have a slow laptop, too, with a too-small hard drive. But instead of giving up on a powerful desktop, I'm sticking in a bigger hard drive and more RAM, and if it were possible I'd put in a faster processor. Laptops are a weird case, though. Most PCs are desktops, and desktops are way more upgradeable. When it's a matter of a hundred dollars to make your machine more powerful, it doesn't make sense to give up functionality instead of adding power.
By the way, if you have a 64-65 mustang with or without back seats, send it to AZ care of me.
Sorry, 2001 Convertible, and you can't have it. You're welcome to a ride if you're ever in Orlando, though.
'stangs were beautiful from 64.5 to 78, ugly but powerful from 79 to 93, ok from 94 to 98, and effing gorgeous from 99 to present.
- 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/
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?
[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.
The typical X implementation is quite different. It has a portable codebase that runs on just about everything, so there much less hand-tuned assembly. It's not as popular, and has far less driver support, so lots of drawing primitives need to be done in software. Being network transparent, it has to serialize everything into a protocol messages.
Add all these up, X is slower. However, a good X implementation could avert all these problems. It's most typical implementations don't. Especially if you got it for free.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
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
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.
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
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 example, I type ctrl-alt-t and I get a terminal (rxvt -fg green -bg black +sb --geometry 80x50). Or I can hit ctrl-alt-r for a run dialogue.
If I want to dial the net I hit ctrl-alt-UP. (rxvt -fg green -bg black +sb -geometry 50x8 -e
If I want to dial down, I hit ctrl-alt-DOWN. (killall ppp)
My dock looks pretty attractive too with WmCalClock (/usr/ports/x11-clocks/wmcalclock). If I double click it, I get jpilot.
Below that is wmfire (/usr/ports/sysutils/wmfire) for eye candy / system load. Then comes my mixer, wmmixer (/usr/ports/audio/wmmixer), and XMMS (/usr/ports/audio/xmms).
With a little bit of playing with the menus (the drag and drop menu configuration is great) you can organize your programs quite easily.
Hope any of this is useful.
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
I installed suse 7.3 on my sparc 5 today, lets just say 3 hours later, KDE took 5 minutes to load, control panel also takes 5 minutes to load. OUCH!
Back to Icewm, and at least its some what snappier.
Side note, my sun blade 100 kept puking at random points of the suse install, that box will scream with kde when the linux is fully ported. BTW, damn it sun, support the creator 3d elite!
The filemanager he mentions seems to be bitroting. Can anyone recommend a windows explorer style file manager for X that I don't have to worry about eating my files? I just searched through freshmeat's 190 matches for "file manager", and found only one file manager that looked usable... and it was binary only.
I normally don't care for such a thing. I get along fine with mv, bash/zsh's advanced replacements (for file in *.fred; do mv $file ${file%.fred}.barney; done), and a little perl script I cooked up to do regexp renaming (remv). But occasionally a certain file management task comes along that leaves me begging for explorer.exe, and its in place edit, and its quick multifile selection that doesn't choke on quotes and spaces.
Anything out there for me?
For those of us who are not complete console monks Nedit really is the perfect solution. While it is fatter than vi etc, the absolute difference is small enough to ignore even on older machines.
The difference is about a meg. Until you turn syntax highlighting on.
The real bummer with nedit is it cannot be plugged into terminal utilities like mutt and slrn easily. You already have a terminal loaded in ram, so you can add vi (a few hundred K RAM) and edit your email, or add nedit and add 3 Megs, which will not load quite so fast.
The difference on my 486 while C programming 1000 line files and using syntax highlighting was enough to make me change to jed. The LOAD time difference. I've never quite been a vi fan but it is certainly usable too.
The huge benefit of nedit is its
1) power and extensibility
2) consistency with Mac/Windows editor interfaces
For that combination it RULEZ.
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.
Every Developer should read this list aloud to themselves 20 to 100 times a day and live as if it were immutable law. If they did, the idea of linux gaining a noticable share of the consumer market would be much closer to reality.
JFMILLER
p.s. for those of you who will claim that Linux is only for those who can figure out how to use it, I say to you, "You are not numerous enought to be signifacant in any world but your own"
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
>No, exactly the opposite; it's saying that we
>should stick a better engine or a supercharger
>or dual exhaust...[etc]
Well, in the case of obsolete pc hardware it's usually not an option to modify or upgrade it, as
these situations generally involve a choice between using it or not, and a zero dollar budget.
Even if I have $3000 for a new notebook, I do NOT have $500 or even $50 for memory and a disk drive for an old one!
What's hard to deal with is the fact that I remember running yggdrasl linux on that very same notebook when it was a current machine, when a P75 notebook was considered desirable, and it was
just fine then. I'm not trying to remove the bumpers and the seats from the CAR, I'm trying to
remove the steel rack from the roof and the dead body in the trunk (from the distribution).
When 16MB of RAM and a 500MB disk drive on a 386/40 was an expensive machine I ran linux with X11 and FVWM, and life was pretty good. That worked better for me than windows 3.11 on the same box. I'd be hard-pressed to put that
same system together today!
There's probably something important about the fact that I still take my 75MHZ toshiba satellite on business trips even though I have several *much* better portables...
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
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
Saying "the only thing right with DOS is that it fits on a floppy" is not the same as saying "DOS is the only thing that fits on a floppy"...
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
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.
...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;
so does a linux system with a gui(Tiny-X,Microwindows,picogui),webbrowser(lynx) email(pine),TCP/IP stack, pcmcia support, cdrom support, a text editor and a webserver.
try that with a dos floppy.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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). . .I had tried everything:
I didn't see Rox in your list. Neither of you provided links to XWC, so I haven't checked it out yet, but you might like ROX. It works so much better than all those bloated things *cough* Nautilus, Konqueror *cough*. It is lightweight, fast, intuitive, and very very flexible (it lets you work the way YOU want to). It is the closest thing to the glory of OS/2's WPS I've found for linux to date.
The best part is that you can put bananas on top of your cheerios, but it's really up to you. You could also put strawberries if that's your thing. Hell, you could put genetically-modified proprietary-DNA banana-strawberry-kiwi blend fruit substitute on your cheerios if you like, it's all about choice :)
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Windowmaker has been in development for years, and is very stable.
It is also very themable, I used it for years until I installed Linux on a faster computer. KDE 2.2.2 works fine on my PII 333 with lots of RAM so I don't really care about the few MBs. But Windowmaker is real great, it runs just fine on a Pentium 133 with 32 MB!
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
BSD is not Linux...
> Oroborus for the window manager. It's default theme is beautiful and it is amazingly quick. Uses only xlib for drawing.
> www.kensden.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Oroborus/ [blueyonder.co.uk]
I just took a look at the home page, & read that the developer discontinued his work on this project on 9 September.
A few other software projects on this list appear to either have vanished or be in stasis. I guess interest is fading in writing small, tight code.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p