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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."
I've said this before and I'll say it again -- FEATURE REQUESTS!
:: See For Yourself What Everyone's Talking About
Users are continually requesting new features to be implemented in their favorite software packages. Of course this is going to add overhead, increased memory and disk space requirements, etc.
As someone working on a product, it's your job (and you take pride in) satisfying those who use your program. If they "ask nicely" for new capabilities, you try your darndest to give them to 'em. Sometimes, just "getting it right" is more important than bug testing or tweaking/streamlining your code; you're too busy working on the next task at hand.
m o n o l i n u x
Time to pull out the ol commadore 64!
Hacker Media
The newest trend in computer software is higher requirements? Windows is lightyears ahead!
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
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.
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.
GNOME for low-end boxes.
From a PPC standpoint, don't even try on anything older than a G3. I've run Ximian GNOME under LinuxPPC on a Motorola Starmax and a 6500/225. Both times were actually _painful_. I don't know if the speed has picked up any since whatever version that was, but I certainly don't want to try again.
Blackbox and E, on the other hand, are both pretty speedy on my 7200/120.
--saint
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.
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
If anyone has any suggestions as to a Linux distro I could try (please bear in mind if over about 50Mbs it has to be from a resumable ftp server) that won't take all night on a 56k modem then I'd be most grateful. (Please remember to post the URL and/ or details of the ftp server).
What you want _probably_ isn't Linux. Take a look at NetBSD for that bad boy. I've got OpenBSD running on a PPro 200 with 32 megs of RAM, and it's great.
--saint
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.
... even though I have a 0.9GHz T-bird. A generation behind the times, maybe, but still a snappier box than I'll need for a while yet. I can actually get shorty (my little 266MHz laptop) running with about the same configuration as gas-o (my big machine), and run much the same apps: emacs, moz, GIMP, LaTeX sometimes if I need to write something for human consumption. How, you ask? Two words: Window Maker. :)
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
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.
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?
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.
I was thrilled with KDE, until I used it. I had serious performance issues on an Athlon 750 w/512M of RAM (serious relative to Gnome performance, that is).
I switched to Ximian and haven't looked back. Performance is of particular interest because I do use several "ancient" machines for assorted purposes and I like to have a consistent WM/DM across all machines. So it runs comfortable on my 200MMX with 64M as well as my Athlon 750.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
In this situation, does Windows have an edge? I've noticed that Windows comes up much faster on my Dual 1GHz P3 with 1GB RAM than KDE 3.0 does. MUCH faster. There's so much hype about Linux someday conquering Windows on the desktop. Is this REALLY possible if Windows runs faster than GNOME and KDE, the two leading GUIs for Linux?
Would this problem be solved by using one GUI library? If you think KDE is slow, try running GNOME apps on KDE. The overhead of loading all of those additional UI libraries is unbelievable. Would Linux on the desktop be more effective if only one UI library was used?
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! ;)
You get a big juicy -1/Illiterate for not reading the article before you responded. The author explains quite clearly why what you suggest is not an option in many environments. You can afford a decent computer, I can afford an even better one, but there are people whose new-equipment budget is zero and who have to make do with whatever five-year-old POS is lying around. Programmers who make software that's unusable for some people just because they (the programmers) aren't affected by the waste and are too lazy to do anything about it are just crappy programmers.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
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.
I actually use a couple of gnome apps, and have the g/f on a very low end system (pentium 1 233).
WM = Windowmaker
Filer/Desktop = ROX
Works great!
Luckily, Enlightenment hasn't been updated since the days when 200mhz was the norm :)
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
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 remember booting an XT and starting a word processor, off floppies, and it still took less time than loading KDE and StarOffice on my AMD 700 with RH 7.1. I also remember booting Word 2.0 on a 386 DX20, with Win31, still faster, also remember booting Word97 on a P100, still faster. Yes I'm sure KDE3 does more than KDE 1, but if you look at EVERYTHING it does, not just the snazzy stuff, but everything, including the window manager, drawing a panel,everything its responsible for, then KDE 3 really does not do all that much more, and the general usage is still pretty much the same. The point is, that my PC not has nearly 100 times the ram of one I had 5 years ago, and is approximately 500 times faster according the the benchmarks I ran, yet for software to run the same speed, or slower, is if you take this into account unforgivable. Even with 4 times the features, a desktop may run 10 times slower than Win 3.1 and by 10 times larger, but its 100's of times slower! With PC's exponentially faster than ones 7 years ago, we should be be enjoying the ability to support 40 people on 1 PC, AI, interfaces that are so fast, that theres no waiting whatsoever to load an app and everything in nice and instant, yet we are still were we where 7 years ago, just able to check e-mail, do word processing etc and still waiting for out PC to load an open file dialog box, and in 7 years time, it wont be any different. Computers 100 times faster than the ones we have now will still just be able to run office apps and a desktop. The point is, if coding was as efficient as it was back then, then we could have the extra features, and still be blindingly fast, but it looks as if were condemmned to be running as fast as we can with hardware upgrades just to stay in the same place. Progess should have had us being able to support many, many more features on our PC's efforlessly, the only software that has really advanced is games, well some of them. If you compare the difference between Quake3 and Wolf3d, youll see what I mean, then compare between KDE 3 and Win95.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Have you tried Fluxbox?
It is built off Blackbox 0.61.1 with some "enhancements". I really like using the tabs between windows.
Sorry but the author never told us what his definition of low end is.. My definition is a Pentium 200 or 233 mmx. and Gnome let alone the Ximian version is NOT sutable for it.
Nautlius is the biggest problem with it sucking up 90% of all your resources.. Best replacement? try your damnedest to delete Nautlius and install ROX. (Rox will even do the desktop dance for you if you like. and for some reason ROX is almost 1/10th the size of Nautilus.. and hellishly faster too..
Basically.. on a low end system.. you really need to abandon all the bloated (P-II and higher required desktop systems that are Gnome and KDE. they have their place with the Windows horsepower equiviliant systems (I use KDE on my 2 processor P-III 866 "low end system") but blackbox+ROX or Enlightenment+ROX or any combination of efficient and tightly written code will give you awesome performance...
I hope that someday both KDE and Gnome will stop the feature-add phase and enter the make is run superfast.... and it can, they just need to take time out from the "fun" of adding toys to the dull part of cutting cruft and optimise..
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I run Gnome on some 'old' systems:
One thing is that on both of these machines, I don't run Nautilus or GMC. Not a big fan of graphical file managers, I don't miss them. It's quite possible that they would slowficate the Gnome experience.
Oh, and another thing. Gnome 1.2, when I installed it, still looked like it could do with some sanding, and maybe another coat of paint. There were things left out of libraries, or in an inefficient way (thinking of some of the drawing routines.) These probably contributed to the memory usage and slowness of some graphical applications. Here's hoping that's all in the past now with Gnome 2 around the corner.
Optimizing software for slower machines has a cost. Just like many other aspects of open source (documentation comes to mind), if there's no incentive for the hackers to do it, it's just not going to get done. My reccomendation for people with old hardware is to run correspondingly old software; usually it's almost as good as the newest version.
HUH? I can run linux and a very useable desktop + browser+ apps on a 486 with 16 meg ram and a 4meg CF card to boot from. Something that windows has never been able to do cince windows 3.11
Linux will be able to run on horribly slow machines long after you and your grandchildren are dead and buried... because it cant be hidden,taken away or forced out of existance.. Linux and the stuff needed to run on stone-age equipment will be around forever....
and that kiddies is what makes it so much cooler and better than anything that Microsoft can ever create. In 10,000 years when archeologists dig out of a cave a redhat 6.2 distro.. they can figure out and run on their trash hardware linux. if they find windows? it wont run and will be looked upon as worthless.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
I for one am glad that GNOME is finally moving into the realm of modern GUIs. Yes, maybe modern is synonymous with slow, but it's also synonymous with features.
If linux is going to make it on the desktop, it's gonna have to match closed sources OSs on a feature for feature basis. This means it has to have a level of feature bloat similar to windows -- and therefore similar compilation times.
I don't cry for those with slower machines "in parts of the world where fast machines are unavailable" (BS, by the way -- my friend in Bangladesh has a better machine than I do, and his family's yearly income is less than my weekly). They still have options: GNOME 1.x, for example. This is Linux, man, there's no need to upgrade if what you have now is working. Sure, the new toys would be great...but if the choice is Windows 3.11 or GNOME 1.x, you're still better off petting the penguin.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Fluxbox is looking VERY cool - especially since they're working towards full ICCCM support, which means full support for KDE and GNOME.
I'd like to see this review looked at again with a gtk theme like Premier (uber-fast, uber-clean) and Fluxbox as the WM!
The Free desktop that Just Works
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...
At work I develop scientific applications. Since I don't want to waste memory, but still want to have a functional X server, I run a window manager called PWM (if you do a search for it on google, use the keywords "pwm" and "ion"). I like it because it takes almost no memory, and allows me to dock windows together. It suits my style of working.
I run a Blue and White G3 at home, with SuSE 7.3. I just reinstalled the system last night in (what appears to be a successful) attempt in building the perfect system. I downloaded the most recent version of Windowmaker (0.80) and spent some time configuring it. It is a sweet desktop. I have all of the applications that I use regularly at my fingertips, have lots of fun dockable apps to do useful things like establish my internet connection and play my ogg-vorbis files, and have lots of eye candy.
I compiled Windowmaker with CFLAGS="-O3" (highest level optimizations), and it screams. I'm not running particularly fast hardware, but with over half a gig of memory plugged into it and my favorite apps optimized, it hauls ass. I absolutely love it. Windowmaker is one of the most overlooked window manager projects out there, and takes a little to get used to, but is well worth the effort.
The middle mind speaks!
I knew people where going to post "So don't install it! Use **insert small window manager here**!"
I believe the point of this excirse is "is it possible?" not whether or not you should. Obviously on a minimalist system you don't install heavy weight software.
There is a reason to point out things like the fact KDE and Gnome have issues running on small systems. It is up to the reader or the developers to figure out for themselves what this means.
You'll find no disagreement from me, if you're talking about optimizing for those slower machines. However, what we're generally dealing with is programmers just pissing away dozens of megabytes and millions of CPU cycles to no purpose whatsoever. I've seen a lot of code in my time that could be simplified or streamlined such that there will be some platforms on which it will run faster and no platforms on which it will run slower, and such that it would be more readable and maintainable besides. Some of it was my code, written before I knew everything. ;-) This is being presented as a tradeoff, and sometimes it is, but other times it's just an out and out waste.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
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.
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 use GNOME and the first thing I did was ditch Nautilus. My beef with Nautilus is it just has too much in it. Its a desktop manager, file manager, web browser, and theme manager. The problem with GNOME is there are other parts of GNOME that do the same thing. If you have a slow enough machine, mine is a K6-2 550, and use Nautilus you'll see GNOME start up and set your background color, pixmap, etc. Then the screen flashes a few times while Nautilus does the same thing. You can not turn off that feature of Nautilus but I you want Nautilus to do themes you're stuck first waiting for whatever other part of GNOME also does themes.
'Same speed C but faster'
I use GNOME at work on a Debian Woody box. I use the GNOME panel and sawfish, and most other GNOME apps. But I use neither GMC nor Nautilus, and I find that the system responds really fast, hogs less RAM, and I don't really miss the icons on the desktop that much. So everyone, what am I missing here? How do you use these file managers in a way that I would benefit by reconsidering them?
I think you're off base. I just used the Wayback Machine to look at PC Magazine from March 1997. Typical is the Dell Dimension XPS P200s which, at $3179, sported a 200MHz PPro and 32MB of SDRAM. Cut those numbers in half to find what a true five-year-old POS would be like, and then consider that a lot of people are still stuck with even older machines than that. Obviously we don't expect such a machine to keep up even with your machine that has 4x the MHz and 12x the MB (not to mention better I/O and who knows what other improvements) let alone a modern machine, but there's no reason a god-damned window manager or file browser shouldn't run just fine on it...and apparently they don't.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
This is a very first world centric view point.
The fact is that it's much easier to get older PC's donated to the third world countries. Throw some nice/efficient apps on them, and they can rock and roll.
Zapman
I built my own distro that boots off a CD-ROM and takes up all of 100 MB worth of space (including about 50MB of docs). Although it was primarily designed for system recovery, the same approach should work for a small hard disk based system and would probably be easier :P
:)
(Actually, I built the image to study boot problems so I could pass the LPIC-2 while it was still in Beta-- my systems rarely crash.) Of course it would be a lot of work but you would learn a huge amount.
You can get Linux to run with as little as 10 MB of free space, but its functionality is rather limited.
Before everyone cryes "Feature Bloat" with regard to Linux consider this: Pine will always be available if you don't like evolution or Kmail, and Linux will ALWAYS run on low-end systems as long as someone wants it to
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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.
Recently I was trying to get Ximian Gnome to run on an 8bpp pseudocolor Tek Xterm (a piece of hardware). Conclusion: it can be done, but don't try to run any other apps that rely on using pseudocolor. The panel or sawfish took all the colors, even with imlib set to a low color pallete.
Now, most somewhat modern apps will allocate a private colormap if it can't get all the colors it needs but there are some old apps that don't do that.
I ended up running icewm.
> I've got OpenBSD running on a PPro 200 with 32 megs of RAM, and it's great.
:-(
Yeap, you certainly don't need much horsepower if you're running a firewall/server. Walnut Creek used to serve *thousands* of users off a T1 with their PPro 200 back in the mid 90s. I forget which BSD they used though.
Couple of questions, if you don't mind:
- Which version of OpenBSD are you running?
- Are you running X on your PPro, or is it "just" a server?
- If you're running it as server, got any good links for setting up BSD firewalls? (TrinityOS rocks for Linux firewalling, but I haven't seen anything like it for BSD
I currently have a PPro 200 w/ 64 Megs running Mandrake, but I've been looking at switching over to OpenBSD once I get some free time.
My two toshiba laptops are both slower and older then the examples provided. One is a Pentium 75, 16 megs of memory, and the other is an old 486 with 4 megs of memory. I hate to think what the reviewer would call them!
Windowmaker works great in this scenario. Highly recommended.
314-15-9265
Blackbox, or fluxbox and a few little apps can be used to make a very, very snappy system. There's no need to give up one's graphical tools to do it either. I run on a p200 with 64Mb of RAM, and the following setup even makes it feel fast.
[Science] is one of the very few things that raises human life a little above farce and gives it the grace of tragedy.
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/index.html
I was able to get a fully functional OpenBSD firewall going by following their FAQ. There were other resources but the FAQ was the most helpful.
My machine? A 486/33 16MB RAM (I've since upgraded to a 486/66 woo hoo!)
This is ridiculous. $999 for a computer! Do you know how many weeks my familly can eat for that much money?
I've not fiddled with it very much, but cmatrix doesn't want to run. XEarth will, though. Which is better anyway.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Neither, in the context of this particular thread. If we're talking about programs like GNOME or KDE, I think we're talking about code that has grown over time with both modularity and performance taking a back seat to bells and whistles.
In a more general context, probably somewhere between your first and third options. A lot of code seems to hover at a level somewhere between "didn't know any better" and "didn't even care". ;-)
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Mind you I have a number of higher end systems on which I like to play around with the newer desktop systems, but the beauty of linux, freeBSD, et al. is the ability to tailor the system the way you want it.
Personally, I am going to ignore the silly bloat arguments being thrown about. IMHO featureful desktop systems have a place, as do lightweight wm's with efficient filemanagers (I still love mc). It just comes down to what's practical and of course, what floats yer boat.
So I get to the end of the article which is pretty much a scathing recount of why the writer likes KDE more than GNOME and think maybe there is going to be some good conclusion. I feel kind of let down now. Wow Ximian GNOME is different than KDE, it won't fit on a 720KB floppy disk, and worst of all a Dorito isn't a powerful enough chip to run it. Please. This is crap. Just looking at a screenshot of Nautilus ought to give you a clue it isn't going to run well on a 6502 with 512KB of RAM.
KDE takes longer to compile than it did a couple version ago, it is ten times more usable now than it was with the 1.0 release. It also packs more applications into the default installation than it used to. If you just want to use KDE apps just install the damn base libraries and don't mess with the DE. The same idea applies to GNOME. Trying to jam KDE 3 or Ximian GNOME 1.4 onto an old POS computer is a fools endeavor and it is dumb to expect all developers to keep the absolute lowest common denominator in mind. I don't think KDE or GNOME EVER ran on a 386 with 4MB of RAM. This argument pops up every once in a while when someone has trouble getting their old computer running some piece of software, to make people listen they whine about the children of third world countries who can't afford a new computer to run KDE or GNOME.
That being said, there is an amount of bloat when it comes to software, there always will be. Not everything can fit on a single floppy disk and saying everything ought to just because some people have older computers is counter productive. Coders with a schedule want it to work and get it out the door, making it elegant just costs you time and may only reduce your compiling time by a couple minutes or the binary size by a couple kilobytes. If you had to write to very constrained hardware it would make sense to save every extra kilobyte but there are simply too many fast computers in the hands of users today to make it worth while to scrimp on everything.
If you know you've got shitty hardware the onus is on you to use software on it that is going to have acceptable performance. You DO have the option with Linux specifically and OSS in general. Linux for the rest of us my ass. Why use KDE or GNOME at all? Are you gaining much from their use? Why not use something a bit lighter and frothy like WindowMaker or BlackBox? Why bitch and moan about the ripple applet in E not being smooth on your Commodore64? There are several lightweight distros around and the major distros also have lighter than usual schemes for you to install.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
"Today's KDE3 release candidate takes eight hours on an Athlon running at 1.2 gHz with 768 megs of RAM. And when it is compiled, it runs just about as quickly as KDE-1.x did on that P-133."
So if KDE 3 runs "just as quickly" as KDE 1 did on the same P133, where's the problem?
Sheesh.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
In terms of what? I don't doubt that Linux is faster at actually doing *work*. However, I find it hard to believe that it is anywhere near as "snappy." I mean opening menus, starting programs, etc.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Oh my. Never mind resource issues. Fluxbox has a very interesting and original design. That tabbed windows gimmick addresses some of my pet usability concerns. And it supports KDE apps. I gotta give it a try!
FYI/OT
It was (at least later) a Micron server with a single Xeon 450 and 4GB RAM. It used FreeBSD, custom FTP software, and could serve ten thousand (!) simultaneous users. They had, IIRC, a 100Mbit connection and hoped to get a gigabit connection, but then they kinda died off with the increasing popularity of broadband, thus eliminating the need to actually buy the CDs. (which is where they made the money for the most part)
Please don't mark this message down, it was not intended for evil.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Couple of questions, if you don't mind:
:-(
Fire away.
- Which version of OpenBSD are you running?
The newest one, 3.0, installed via network from the boot floppy.
- Are you running X on your PPro, or is it "just" a server?
I was running X on it, but then I got a spare Mac to install YDL on. The PPro doesn't even have a monitor on it any more. And hasn't for a while.
10:42PM up 36 days, 4:26, 1 user, load averages: 0.34, 0.24, 0.14
- If you're running it as server, got any good links for setting up BSD firewalls? (TrinityOS [csuchico.edu] rocks for Linux firewalling, but I haven't seen anything like it for BSD
I'm using it as a server, but not as my firewall. There are a lot of OpenBSD firewall guides out there, though - check the FAQ at openbsd.org for some leads.
--saint
It's possible, but just not for everyone. Then again, if you're on a tight budget and determined to do some computing on "ancient" hardware, you're not going to be able to do it the easy way (well, I suppose you could use Freedom Office or whatever it's called.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Have a look here and here. The speed problems with KDE are in fact being scrutinised in interesting ways.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
I recently came across emelfm (GTK file manger) and I think everyone should take a look at it. It works dual or single-paned. Supports drag-n-drop, has a built-in command-line with output window, and has user configurable buttons (open XTERM here, et al.).
It's so configuable that it even lets you specify what command you want to use to DELETE a file (if you don't want the standard delete behavior).
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant