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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."
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
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
I completely disagree.
:O) Not just getting it to work and "moving on to the next thing at hand".
First of all, if I'm a free software developer I owe nothing to the users of my software. This is because I'm not being payed for my work. I'm doing it out of love for what I'm doing. If you want something added then do it yourself.
Now if I'm being payed for my work than that's a different story but I still disagree with you. Yes it is my responsibility to meet the demands of the customers because they are the one's that are putting the cash in my pocket when you get down to it. However, it is also my responsibility to ensure that what they get for their money works properly. That means testing, optimising and fixing bugs the "right way"
--
Garett
...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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
This is just untrue. Nautilus is very actively maintained. Darin Adler, former Eazel-employee are maintainer on his spare time, now together with Alex Larsson.
Lots of the slowness in Nautilus 1.0.x seems to come from general slowness in the immature Gnome-libraries that only Nautilus exposed fully in Gnome 1.x. Nautilus for Gnome 2 got a lot faster for "free", when shifting to the Gnome 2 platform. In addition, lots of other speed improvements have been made.
I can happily say that Nautilus 1.1.x (The Gnome 2 development platform) is very fast. Opening a new window is about twice as fast. Changing directories is almost instantanious. Even large image-dirs with thumbnailing turned on is acceptably fast. This is on a Pentium III 550 with 256MB of ram.
I'm going to try this out on a lower end machine, but the huge speed increases is reported to have a nice effect here as well. Nautilus should be usable on reasonably low end machines now, if you turn off the latest bells and whistles.
For me, it is also nice that the SVG-rendering in Nautilus 2 is a lot faster. I'm unable to "feel" a speed difference between a regular theme and a vector-icon (SVG) theme.
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.