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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
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
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 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.