Slashdot Mirror
Ximian GNOME and "Low-End" Systems
Gremeth writes: "This article over at LinuxandMain points out the increase in hardware requirements for many Linux applications, and gives us a good look at GNOME for low-end boxes. Powell details his journey throug the Ximian GNOME experience, starting with the download and ending in some configuration issues. A good read for those of us who have older systems."
KDE3, soon to be released, does marginally more than KDE-1.x did
I'm betting there's hordes of KDE develepers out there that would gladly wring this guy's neck for that nasty little comment.
The latest Linux-Mandrake version 8.2 allows you to perform a base install that only consumes 65MB of disk space. See my user info for a link.
m o n o l i n u x
...let them take over! Run something sane, fast and highly customisable like WindowMaker and create shortcuts or menus for your favourite g- and k-based apps.
If you really have to use KDE and want some serious speed increases, then compile both KDE and Qt from source with the switch --no-g++-exceptions. This is a hint from Linux from Scratch which works very well.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
there sure is a galeon rpm that ximian builds. maybe it does not get installed by default, but you can grab it via red-carpet under the Install submenu.
:)
that is what I am using right now to post this message
Of course, a large part of the problem lies with Nautilus, which is (if this is in fact possible) slightly slower than Mozilla on my system. Seeing as Mozilla is constantly getting faster and Nautilus is no longer actively maintained, I see this as a potential problem.
I will say, though, that I don't mind the menubar at the top of the screen. I've populated it with the things I need, and it rarely gets in my way.
Of course, I have a large screen and frequently use five or six virtual desktops to hold all my windows, so a few pixels of the top is not nearly as important as pager problems would be. On that front, I have always preferred Gnome's paging model to KDE's; I use a setup with four viewports per workspace, with a 1000-ms delay to swap viewports by moving the pointer to the edge of the screen.
In any case, the point of this long-winded comment is that Ximian Gnome is a neat package, but the overall speed is not nearly as nice as I'd like it to be. (And, before I get flamed, the reason I haven't yet turned off all the bits of chrome that Ximian installs, like Nautilus, is that I actually like chrome. I just wish I could have a schweet-looking system that's fast too.)
Ah well... Everything works for the time being, so I'm unlikely to change anything on this system anytime soon (I actually have to do real work on this computer). On my other machine, I use KDE whenever I start X -- which isn't often.
That's what I love about Linux... you get choices. If I want Gnome, I've got Gnome. If I want super-fast, geekoid-to-the-max sysadmin functionality, I've got bash. I'm happy.
"Anything is better than IE, and you can quote me on that." -- Wil Wheaton.
Why not? I run netBSD on a 20 mhz machine from time to time. (a sun3/60). My only linux machine is a 386-25, but the monitor failed years ago so now it sits on a shelf and handles my mail. Works just fine.
Now I admit those machines are a bit slow, but they work, and they are more than 10 times faster than the atari I started out with (1.6 mhz, and 8 bits).
My main machine runs at 200 mhz, but it has two processors. I see no reason to replace it, it is afterall rock solid, and I don't like 3-d graphical games. I don't need more power, I need the power I have used wisely.
There's a lot of good work being done in window managers, and most of them are a lot less resource-hungry than GNOME or KDE. (My particular favorite is Enlightenment, mainly because I find the design very creative.) Of course, they all cater to folks with a serious let-me-tweak-everything mindset. But then, who else wants to run a GUI on old box that most people would just throw out?
spoken like I would have said so myself. In fact I thought I wrote that with someone elses name.
For real though, Black box is a great small and fast window manager. When I am in need for a small fast linux install running on old hardware I start with zipslack add Xfree and the Blackbox WM. BB is also a great WM for low res (640x480x256 colors) monitors, think VNC.
Have you tried Fluxbox?
It is built off Blackbox 0.61.1 with some "enhancements". I really like using the tabs between windows.
Nautilus certainly is maintained (by Darin Adler and Alex Larsson) see the developers mailing list for more details at the moment the gnome2 port is just about finished and the speed improvements they've got into nautilus2 are amazing. Eazel may have died a while back, but not all the developer left...
Here's looking forward to GNOME2.
Especially Nautilus is a speed-demon in the latest Gnome2-versions.
This should mean that most people having trouble with Nautilus slowness should now be able to use it fine.
This also means that Gnome 2 is not a huge and bloated upgrade.
I beg to differ. I have a Compaq 420CT notebook (486 75MHz) with 20MB ram running Debian Woody just groovy. It has a WD video chipset which works great either as standard VGA (16 colors) or as SVGA (still 640x480 but with 256 colors). X is slow, of course and this article is right on as there's no way I would consider running GNOME or anything that new on it (though I did run Enlightenment DR13 before, and it was actually not too bad!).
I know there will be lots of people posting about window manager XYZ or the like, but I have finally settled on a very usable and very fast configuration that I think should not be overlooked.
I run the following:
DE/WM: XFce
File Manager/Desktop icons: Rox filer/XFtree
Web Browser: Galeon, Opera or Dillo
Mail Client: Sylpheed or Evolution
Word Processor: AbiWord, Applix or WP8
Other Desktop apps: Gnumeric, JPilot
I have two machines: An Athlon 900 with 768MB of RAM and an old Laptop. A P233 with 64MB RAM. I find that the above works perfectly on either. Initially I set XFce/Rox/Sylpheed/Dillo up just for the laptop. At the time I was using KDE on the big machine. Then I realized how much all of the fancy integration costs. KDE was unusable on the laptop, Gnome without Nautilus or GMC was okay, but XFce etc. put them all to shame.
Rox is a great file manager. It's blindingly fast, has lots of features normally only associated with Natilus or Knoqueror, and is very tiny. Same goes for XFce.
Also, XFce has very good keyboard bindings that just make sense.
If I was going to create a distribution tomorrow I would use the above setup as the default rather than KDE or Gnome. The apps are great, but the overall weight of the system is just too much. I find XFce on my Debian Potato laptop is finally about as fast as Win95 was on the same machine. Oh, and PCMCIA actually works better on that machine in Linux than it did in Windows.
Honestly, XFce and Rox are such nice programs, I'm really shocked that more people don't use them. They're fast, the developers are responsive, and the programs are small and stable. I used to cringe when people would tell me that they were installing Linux onto a machine with lower specs than my laptop. It doesn't have to be that way.
As for the apps, most Gtk apps that I use seem to be as fast as you could expect. Xmms, Gnumeric, abiword, jpilot, even gimp are all quite fast considering what they do. Personally, I'm impressed that the author got StarOffice to work as well as he did. I tried OpenOffice on my laptop. I started it up, a few minutes later the HD was still thrashing. I gave up and logged out. Works great on the Athlon, though, and build 642 seems a bit faster. Applix and WordPerfect 8 are _much_ faster. In fact, I'd argue that recent builds of AbiWord aren't actually much speedier than WordPerfect 8 for Linux.
Anyway, there's my 2 cents.
That's bullshit. You can write new software that's fast. All the stuff I write is fast.
Now, software authors don't *have* to write things to be as fast as they used to be, but that doesn't mean that they can't.
Furthermore, your claim that new software is slower because of new features is totally bogus. Most slowdown is because people use general-purpose libraries that do tons of crap (like gnome-libs sanity-checks all sorts of stuff) and don't feel the need to speed things up because it's "fast enough" on their personal machine.
All software developers should be required to use three year old machines with lots of bells and whistles (multi monitors, joysticks, etc) so that all software is fast and supports hardware features.
As far as I'm concerned, yes it does.
Windows loads faster on my PC, and applications generally load quicker. For example (and I'm going to make this comparison), opening the File Explorer onto my C: drive takes a fraction of a second, whereas Konqueror in KDE 2.2.1 takes several seconds. My PC isn't brand new, but it is a P3-700, 256Mb with a 20Gb Seagate.
Well, you'd put the dock at the right edge of the screen, vertically, where it would fit 7 tiles, or rather 6, since you'd lose one for the dock tile itself (wish there was a way to get rid of that one). If you want to use the clip (lower right) you would just be able to fit 5 tiles in the dock. But 5 tiles is more than enough, because both the app menu and the window list are reached by clicking on the background, not through some button you actually need to navigate to. And there are special tiles out there that swallow other tiles so you can make one tile expand into a row of tiles, gnome dock menu style.
My (rather old) laptop has a 640*480 screen, but I run a virtual 800*600 viewport on it (X is very good at doing that kind of stuff), and use pwm on it. Pwm doesn't look as cool as windowmaker (it's themeable though), and due to the complete lack of buttons on the titlebars it's slightly slower to use, but it's designed for small screens. It has the background menu's of windowmaker, it can use windowmaker dock applets, it supports window grouping into a single frame (with tabs to navigate between them, fluxbox style, although pwm did it first), which it can do automatically, so all your xterms can end up in a single window as soon as you launch them, for ease of navigation. And best of all, the binary is only something like 400 k. It keeps surprising me how little pwm is actually being used out there, since it seriously kicks ass.
The guy who wrote it also built on pwm to design a window manager that doesn't need a mouse called ion. It divides the screen up into html-like frames that you can change the size of and switch to. Very cool. Though I'm still a little too attached to my mouse to actually use that.