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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."
It's the same with *any* machine though. The more functionality and power an OS has, the more power and drive it's going to need behind it. If this wasn't the case, there'd be a time where faster hardware would become pointless.
Roadkill is yummy.
Who says that you need to run the latest and greatest? I have my p133 sitting at school right now running slackware 4, KDE 1.1.2, with two 4 gig Hard Drives and 64MB RAM. Meanwhile, on my box at home, I jsut upgraded to KDE3RC3, 750Mhz, 384MB, 60G. At school, my computer is fine for exactly what I need, KDE has been stable, and honestly. Both machines are running at the same pace, and KDE 3 has more bells and whistles. If you don't want all the extra bells and whistles, why do feel like you need to upgrade?
The current versions of software are designed to run on recent hardware. This has always been true, if there is a need to upgrade your software, you may need to upgrade yours system.
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
I use Linux for most of my work with WindowMaker, except when I'm at a client site. Right now I'm using an NT box and Exceed to work on a 4 processor AIX box. I carry AIX compiled GNU utilities whereever I go, and a tiny window manager called gwm. It does all I want or need: xterms and a virtual desktop, in 500K.
If you've got a really dinky box, I can recommend WindowMaker. If your machine is really REALLY dinky, then use something even lighter than that. Not a hard decision.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I run Ximian GNOME and Red Hat 7.2 on a relatively old box: Pentium 233 MMX with 96 megs of RAM and 20 gig hard drive (the old 1 gig drive finally died.). It's a little slow; sometimes it takes a few seconds for a menu to be displayed. On the other hand, the "user experience" is very smooth. I wouldn't want to use anything else: not Windows, not KDE. (This is a matter of personal prefernce; ymmv).
My only major complaint is that Galeon isn't a part of the Ximian GNOME package. They have Mozilla, which is good, but Galeon simply has a smaller resource footprint and a better user interface. Obviously it's trivial to install the appropriate Galeon RPMs; OTOH, I often wonder why Ximian hasn't adopted this browser as a part of their standard packages. I look forward to the day when this changes.
Finding God in a Dog
I once got RH 5.2 to fit on a 416mb drive with around 80mb to spare (I had no swap space, mind you)..
I had X and fvwm95 on it. There were no compiling or other 'tools' though.
But here's the thing - a HD like that, a box like yours or the one I play with in my spare time.. They're no longer low end, they're antiques.
Low end today means at least 2gb of space and 2-300, if not more, mhz.
The thing is, modern day windowmanagers and desktop enviornments suck just as much resources as Microsoft Windows. In some cases, more. (But hey, I think Enlightenment is worth it.)
Unless you're a minimalist, or a command line commando, I don't think you'll find much out there to run on antiquated boxes. And I think this might be one of the reasons some people are turned off to Linux - they're told they can run it on that old 486 in their basement and it'll be faster than Win 2k. In reality, it'll run like a piece of crap. Not a good first impression..
BlackBox is highly configurable, too. I was bored one day filling in at one of our data centers and decided to switch the Ops workstation to use BlackBox. One thing I wish KDE could do is run a program like CMatrix in the root window... :-)
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
C'mon people. Let go of the past.
Low-end now is considered...300-400mhz, where the latest RedHat distros run great.
You can get a brand name, 1.6ghz, 256mb, 60gb, WITH a flat screen for $999
That should be low end, but it's not
I successfully used Slackware on my laptop - AMD K6-2/333 with 64 megs of RAM and a 4 gig HD... I only loaded X when I needed to hit a site with Netscape, and in that situation I ran twm as a window manager. It wasn't great, but it worked.
On lower end machines like that, you may want to consider NOT using X, and stick to text mode.
This guy is complainng about bloat and performance of Ximian Gnome and KDE, then goes on to reveal he has been using Mosfets Liquid theme and other eyecandy goodies. Well OF COURSE it's going to be going slow. He also seems to blame StarOffice's slow laucnhing on KDE. He doesn't seem to have a clue what he is talking about.
If you want a fast desktop on low end hardware, use WMaker ir FVWM or something simmilar. If you want eyecandy, use KDE/Enlightenment/Gnome. There is no news here, everyone has known this for a very long time.
Likewise, people with low end comps are often getting screwed by missing out on great new stuff that they just can't run.
Being that I am a member of the former (I built my own uber comp and have two Dell uber comps) I am sensitive to the latter.
So I wonder if software can be developed to be sensitive to the user's comp. SOmetimes this is done - Unreal Tournament detects what video settings you are capable of. If this was done more, we wouldn't have to see software constantly coded down to the least common demoninator. The only piece of software that seems to be doing this in a forward looking way is (not surprisingly) a game - Asheron's Call 2.
This is just another chicken and the egg essay. Is it the availability of hardware resources that drives developers to write 'bigger' code with more features, or is it the 'bigger' code with more features that pushes hardware to be upgraded? In essence, it is both. They are completly symbiotic. Nither would exsist without the other, therefore the forward motion of the hardware industry, along with a higher number of features available, are natually occurring phenomina. Don't moan that you don't want to buy new hardware. Do what I did and bite the bullet: get a job, hippie! ;)
Really. Newer software is designed because newer hardware is available. The new software is generally coded for/with the new hardware in mind.
If this guy wants to run a system on older hardware, he should be using software that was designed around the same time the hardware was available. Try the Linux 2.0 kernel series, X 3.3.6. Older distributions had smaller foot prints. Older versions of window managers would be smaller and quicker to compile. Speaking of which, if you have an old system, don't expect to be able to compile all these new software packages with new features designed to take advantage of new hardware, in a reasonable amount of time. Use the older stuff with feature sets that match those of your hardware.
Older software is still stable, too. That's why at the time it was released as a 'stable version'. It just doesn't have some of the new features and additions that consume resources. Said features weren't around in old software, because said resources weren't available.
-kidlinux.
The great thing about Linux is that you can cut out the windowing system altogether and still have a useful, up to date machine. I was only half-way joking with a friend today that I wanted to pick up an old Powerbook 170 off of eBay and slap NetBSD for 68k powered procs on it (http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/mac68k/index.html) to make it a smooth links, elm, vi utilizing geekbox. That's a bit extreme, but conosle-only on my old Motoral StarMax 603e isn't.
So though I'd agree that no author has any obligation to keep hardware requirements down so that they'll run on a P1 133 MHz box and that you can't expect to run tomorrow's GNOME on yesterday's system, one bit of the "beauty" of Linux is that you can still run tomorrow's software without having to make updates to parts of your system you don't want to update -- or, in this case, add the part to your system at all!
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
With the versions and default sessions I get with redhat 7.2, I measued the memory usage of KDE and gnome. KDE weighs in at a hefty 95 MB, while gnome uses "only" 41 MB. For comparison, the fvwm2 setup I use includes an email checker that tells me how many mesages I have, a clock, a loadgraph, cpu usage graphs (per CPU), button bar, and virtual desktop pager. The workings of the window manager itself are more configurable than either gnome or KDE. And all this is only 4MB! That's about 24 times less than KDE.
I've seen in several places people say that its okay for newer software to require newer hardware. That's absolute bull-crap. Newer software should only require more power if it is more features than older software. I can accept a fully anti-aliased, transparent-everything desktop to be slower than a standard one, because of all the eye candy. However, KDE and GNOME in their present state aren't any more functional than Windows 2k/XP. Yet, they are much, much slower*. Say you're grading things wholistically. You're three important catagories (on the desktop) are features, performance, ease of use, stability, and security. Win2k/XP wins the first one, not only because it has features that GNOME and KDE don't, but because these features are much more mature and widely used. The KDE/GNOME component systems might be great, but far more apps take advantage of COM/OLE on Windows. Win2k/XP wins the second one, hands down. Even with my 1.5GHz KDE2 machine, I still sometimes look longingly at my brother's 750Mhz Win2K machine. The stability bit is a wash. WinXP itself is rock solid, but Windows apps are often flaky. On the other hand, same parts of GNOME and KDE (Konq and Galeon in particular) can be flakey as well, so its probably even. In terms of ease of use, its also probably a wash. As long as you've got a sysadmin, WinXP is as easy to maintain as KDE/GNOME. WinXP is more consistant than either, but Windows apps tend to be more annoying and less customizable, which cancels that out. In terms of security, both are even. WinXP has far more powerful security options (ACL, etc) which are important in multi-user desktops. However, WinXP tends to have more security faults, which cancels the advantages. Normally, security would go to Linux, but on a desktop, access control tends to be more important than hacking-resistance. So, in most of the catagories, its even between WinXP and GNOME/KDE. If WinXP performs a hell of a lot better, what advantage does GNOME/KDE have? The only thing I can think about is that its free software, which is the only reason I use Linux and not Windows. Its a damn good reason, but it would be nice to have some other perks too...
* Which is ironic in itself, because they're running on kernel that is much, much faster. They can't even blame X, because (from the benchmarks I've done) X is damn competitive to GDI, and in many respects (blitting bitmaps, for example) can even beat DirectX. Nope, after about 4.x, the "but X sux" arguement kind of dissapeared.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
And that's a shame, because a person needs only access to a computer and sufficient interest in order to create his or her own route out of poverty.
I'm not really sure I understand where this person is comming from... The largest Social Movement is South America, Brasil's MST (landless workers movement) use Land reform, land occupation, education, and community building to escape poverty.
If only it was as simple as loading up a computer with free software! Actually, the computer industry is terrible when it comes to poverty! The highest concentration of highly toxic waste sites (known as SUPERFUND sites) are in the Silicon Valley. We ship about 200,000 computers, which (including the monitors) high levels of lead, cadmium, etc to developing countries, where they pollute landfills and communities. This increases conditions of poverty, not helps them.
Absolutely correct. GNOME and KDE attempt to reproduce all the functionality of Windows. They'll probably never be as bloated as Windows (or as inflexible), but there's a minimum amount of overhead for all those features.
The most important point for people with "low-end" boxes to remember is... that they have low-end boxes! You can't possibly expect every piece of software in existence to run fast on your old Pentium or whatever. If you have older hardware, use suitable software.
For example, I recently set up a 486-33 laptop with 8MB of ram as a webserver. It works just fine. Is it running Apache? No way. I didn't even bother to try. Why? It's called being realistic. With such old hardware, you use a simpler, smaller webserver. And likewise, with a low-end (say, Pentium) desktop, use WindowMaker. For a 386 being used as a desktop, get GeoWorks (if it's still available?) or whatever.
The point is, while optimized software is certainly a useful goal. Just don't expect miracles. You can't reproduce the functionality of Windows plus some on top of the functionality of X on top of the functionality of Linux and expect it to run on just anything.
Optimization? Do you think I have time to Optimize KDE and Gnome singlehandedly! Seriously though if you've done programming, youll realize that efficient coding practices need to be adopted from the start. To write efficiently you must select an appropriate language (fast, and not java for simple stuff), and code with speed in mind and design for program for efficient execution and for a small footprint. If a program is bloated, optimisation will do little, but make bloat run a little faster. You can't optimize an elephant into a mouse. If you want a mouse, you need to build a mouse from the start.
Secondly, I guess the app start up time does have to do with hard drive speed, but hard disks ARE still much faster, not 500X, but possibly 5 to 10 times, and still faster than a floppy. Also, with 384 meg ram, you can re-load and app without touching the hard drive and its still slow. Even with the KDE file manager completely cached in ram, it still takes a while to start. It's simply bad design. Oh by the way, I came close to converting my company to Linux form Win98, but the steep hardware requirement's for a reasonable desktop (most users would not be able to get by with Window Maker) made it unfortunately impossible. A small company like mine still stuck with P133/32MG ram is actually better off financially sticking with Win98 than migrating to Linux. Even on the high end machines here. I imagine there are MANY other companies which came to the same conclusion. The only option is to use LTSP.