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

[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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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: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!

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

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.

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.