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

lo-fat?

[The Turd Report]

Looking at the average linux user, I don't think lo-fat is in their vocabulary. (or diet)

there are distros for this purpose

[Frothy Walrus]

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 :).

Re:there are distros for this purpose

[pinkpineapple]

Mod the original post up people!

The reason I run debian and shy away from distros like RH and Mandrake is to be able to keep my computer waist slim, and its diet clean and lean.

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. Just go to #debian irc and ask questions, you'll get nice answers.

PPA, the girl next door.

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.

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.

Why no mention of APT?

[Nailer]

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.

Re:Why no mention of APT?

[Nailer]

Then join the list ask Matthias. Better yet, point him at the RPMfind source packages and ask him to upload them to freshrpms - he's a nice guy and really does a good job of making sure it all works cohesively so he'll probably bug fix them along the way.

Kernel

[bartyboy]

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 vs Ice, and some comments on programs

[Cuchullain]

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.

Re:What's wrong with DOS?

[rebug]

What's wrong with DOS?

I think I could give you a much shorter response by listing what's right with DOS:

• it fits on a floppy

Dont want to start a flame war

[Zule_Boy]

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

Re:Dont want to start a flame war

[LinuxHam]

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.

erm ... some things are a little stupid ...

[SuperDuG]

First off ... if you want small and fast ... Try peanut linux ... Website or ISO's. "Just 99 Mb of data contain this already pre-software configured OS with a spectacular GUI for the most versatile operating system available today!. - Quoted from their page.

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.

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:A few more suggestions

[doodleboy]

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.

Security - that's just the problem with older, unsupported distributions like rh5.x. There would be so many holes that would have to be plugged that you'd effectively end up with a new distro anyway. That's the best case, assuming you were willing to scour several years worth of bugtraq vulnerabilities and do a lot of manual labour yourself. Why bother with all the hassle, when a newer distro does all the heavy lifting for you?

I've installed Slackware 8 on a few older systems and I'm very impressed with it. Very lean and stable. It gives you good control over the install process, and it's easy to squeeze it onto small hard drives and old computers. And it's new and still supported, meaning that security updates are only a download away.

Nedit lightweight ??

[blakestah]

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.

Re:okay...

[rebug]

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.

Video players, fm and word processing

[Jacek Poplawski]

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.

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.

Re:Stripped-down Debian?

[Niksie3]

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

Re:Red Hat and the like are killing Linux

[lactose99]

I don't know how much familiarity you have with Mandrake, but I've been using it as my desktop OS on 3 boxes since 7.1. You've ALWAYS had the option to deinstall most of the bloat during the install, and it even removes the dependencies for you as well! Every time I've installed it (7.1, 7.2, 8.0, and 8.1), I have simply deselected the qt libraries to get rid of all KDE/qt stuff which I don't really have a use for. Then, just deselect gnome-libs and all the GNOME stuff dies too. Now usually I manually re-add gnome-libs and gnome-libs-devel by themseleves so I can run Gnome apps, and still not have all (of what I consider) the bloat of the GNOME and KDE desktops. You can also opt to install using only the install disk (as opposed to the supplemental disks 2 and 3 with 8.1), to further reduce apps.

In the end, an rpm -qa, then an rpm -qi on each "questionable" package helps me to remove packages that don't sound/look after the install.

These distros aren't "killing Linux", they're just doing what they should be doing-- showing new users the wealth of open source and free software programs available with a wonderful free OS. If you don't like the extra crap, then feel free to not install it/deinstall it later.

I'd rather a newbie have more apps to play with, then him get a stripped-down Linux box with no 'fun' programs and having him ask where all the real software is. Linux could use more desktop market share, and more applications with a default install help to fuel that.

Linux From Scratch

[J'raxis]

Linux From Scratch. Not for newbies, but you can make an extremely small distro yourself.

Re:Linux From Scratch

[graveyhead]

In the same vein: byolinux brew your own.

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.

Re:debian/slack for newbies?

[abe ferlman]

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).

Re:debian/slack for newbies?

[aardvarkjoe]

Someone please do tell me if this is now easier with debian.

It isn't. If you don't know exactly what's in your box, and you're not an expert -- Even people who would normally be comfortable with a Linux desktop, for the most part, aren't up to ripping apart their computers and scouring the net for the model numbers -- you'll never get your hardware set up properly.

On a box where I don't know the hardware, my first move is to do an install of Mandrake. I write down all the drivers loaded, etc., and then wipe it and install Debian. But, of course, that's not something that a newbie would want or be able to do -- so in their case, they ought to just stick with Mandrake (or Red Hat, or whatever, although IME mandrake has the best hardware detection.)

Are there any of the 'minimal distributions' combined with a good installer that does a decent job of hardware autodetection? I might be convinced to switch to it, if it could get me away from the silly, two-step, annoying dance I have to do.

best distro for this

[staeci]

HowTo Build a Minimal Linux System from Source Code

Linux from Scratch

Now if someone can tell me why programs (so far MAKEDEV and Lilo) won't run from
harddrive /dev/hdd1 I'll be a happy little linuxer

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

Re:most lightweight graphcial web-browser?

[Waffle Iron]

I just loaded the latest 'familiar' distro onto my iPAQ pocket PC, and it came with a cool web browser I'd never heard of named dillo. I don't know much about it, but it is fast, even on a handheld. It left Pocket IE in the dust.

(BTW, I ran some Python-based benchmarks the iPAQ and it seems to have horsepower similar to that of a 66-MHz 486.)

Re:The only thing left out...

[SCHecklerX]

1. Don't boot to XDM runlevel
2. Create a .xinitrc that loads your windowmanager as the last line in it, everything else you want to run as background processes before it
3. startx

My .xinitrc:

wmaker

My way...

[madleech]

Here's what i use.

• 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.
  rox.sf.net
• 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/
• FSPanel, for F*ing Small Panel. The whole app is only 10k under linux! Plus it works and includes a pager (optional patch).
  www.chatjunkies.org/fspanel/

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.

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.

BSDs as an option.

[saintlupus]

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

xwc seems to have disapeared

[jmd!]

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?

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: Moz doesn't count...

[SCHecklerX]

Try this:

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

stick with plain X11 and screen-oriented pgms

[markj02]

I'd recommend learning mutt as the e-mail client, one of the screen oriented news readers (if you care about news), vim as a text editor, and links or lynx as a web browser. The "screen" program can be used to multiplex. If you want something more coherent, you can get most of that functionality within Emacs or Xemacs. All that stuff has some mouse support, but it also works great over dial-up and doesn't use a lot of resources by modern standards.

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.

Ratpoison

[Pete]

I'm sort of surprised that nobody's mentioned Ratpoison yet, as it'd have to be the slimmest window manager out there. :)

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.