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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."
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
Not everyone has $999 in their back pocket... Most public schools, for example, can't just go out and buy a lab of brand new computers, and are still forced to use computers from 5 years ago (if they're lucky, that is).
Dinivin