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Low Resource Distro and Window Manager for Kids?
Philljd asks: "Computers 4 Kids is an organization run by the IT & ;CS department of Wollongong University in Australia that picks up computers from the local area, installs Linux on them and gives them to needy kids. We want to know what Slashdot readers think would be the best choice of distribution and window manager for an average system spec of a Pentium 100, given that the kids are around 10-13."
This question seems to come up all the time. Windowmaker is a good choice because it's relatively easy to lock down, and it's easy to use. And, it takes few resources. There are others, but this will do the job.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Icewm is pretty good, fast, easy, kind of looks like windows.
I've found slackware tends to be nice to slower hardware. Slack 3.0, for example, is running quite briskly on my 386 now that I upgraded from 3 to 7 Megs of RAM. Plus, I could fit lots of development tools and a minimalist X in 80 megs of HD and 17 megs of swap.
Of course, thanks to glibc, such things are now very tough. But, don't forget, slack used to use BSD libc (which is small and fast!), and guess what still uses it? that's right, *BSD. So if you'll consider more than just linux, don't be afraid to look at NetBSD (which is a little smaller and lighter than FreeBSD.... not sure how OpenBSD compares).
You might also want to test-run Knoppix, since it doesn't even need to be installed (so it can't hurt!).
For window managers, OpenLook VWM, FVWM, Blackbox (probably the best), or mwm. Please don't force them to use twm... they'll never want to look at a computer again!
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
Unfortunately, I have not found a lightweight distro which is "easy" to install. Gentoo is great, because it can be uber-optimized, but it is also tough to install. Redhat and Mandrake are easy to install, but are very heavy.
I'd recommend checking out *BSD. FreeBSD 4.8 runs on pretty skimpy hardware. Throw something like fluxbox on there, and you are ready to go.
10b||~10b -- aah, what a question!
I'd give XFCE and Blackbox/Openbox a try. They both run fine on a p200 here. I'm running debian/testing and it fits nicely on a 1-2gigs HD.
XFCE is probably better for kids as it uses icons, kids react better to nice looking icons than to text menus (*box). It's also possible to remove the configuration options from the XFCE panel so the kids can't tweak it by accident (or intentionnaly?). XFCE also minimizes applications to icons, which would be easier to use for kids (no taskbar here..).
Try XFCE (www.xfce.org) It's a great light weight WM but is still easy on the eyes, very easy to customize, stable and fast. It's only a 4MB download as well.
Snoozer.
Easy to install, and runs great on these older machines. As well, maybe Abiword and Gnumeric. Kids might like to write, and do math homework and such.
:)
If the box will be shipped with a pinter don't forget to portinstall APSFilter or magicfilter.
Web browsing will be quite bad on a box that small, but if it has enough memory (96-128m), Moz *will* work, and it provides email to boot.
Any games you can find that work on machines that small will be a big plus also. If the machine is a pure homework station, it won't be used as frequently
Success is as dangerous as failure, hope as hollow as fear.
Sounds like a cool project, nice one!
Debian's a good bet as it installs with a very small footprint and you can work on a good custom build with just what you want. Once perfected, it's easy to get the packages list file of one machine and install packages on another from it. It's excellent for network installs and security updates, nice and stable, not cutting edge (which is good in this case), albeit a little more tricky to learn - but once you have, it, even dselect, is very easy to maintain.
Working in a community wireless project, I've installed builds of it on old recycled Pentiums on I find that either Blackbox, or even the old FVWM or OpenLook (still very good window managers) are the ones to go for, stay away from KDE and GNOME, they're monstrously big in both disc space and RAM terms.
I spend a fair amount of time working on a ThinkPad 560 (Pentium-120, 40MB RAM, 800 MB HD, 800x600x16bit LCD), and I have to say that most of the "standard" desktop environments (GNOME, KDE) choke a system like that.
Windowmaker is indeed a good choice for a basic window manager and launcher/task manager, but it doesn't provide a lot of the file management and drag-and-drop support that even kids expect from their computers these days.
I'd recommend ROX Filer (rox.sf.net), which does a good job of basic file management, image preview, etc.; XFCE might be an option, as well, esp. once they release their current development version.
Seriously.
The OS should be simple and replacable. Knoppix is perfect for that.
twm is simplistic, minimalist, and doesn't require much in the way of learning.
Don't teach kids how to use a window manager, teach them whatever you want to teach them.
When they get annoyed with twm, they can move on to something else, and hopefully know enough to choose for themselves. (I know a few OS developers who swear by windows98 as a window manager, and that's cool. Myself, I like wmaker. Being able to choose is the point.)
I forget what 8 was for.
Debian is an excellent system for these circumstances. It is probably not as streamlined as Slackware, but what feels like a 5-10% decrease in speed is well worth trading for the ease of software installation and, more importantly, the massive amounts of compatibility work put into the apt system.
For a window manager, I would use WindowMaker. It is responsive and configurable. Up until 1999 I used it on my primary system, which was a 486 66mhz.
If the people recieving the computers already have a considerable amount of exposure to Windows, then fvwm2 might be a good choice.
The computer is fast becoming the replacement of the TV. There's no shame in having a small monitor since the computer can do things where as the TV just sort of sits there.
Suggestion:
Create a KidsComp spec and software to build to it. Just giving a kid a computer is just as bad as sitting them in from of Looney Tunes.
Create a KidsTools spec so that kids can learn about computer technology not just play games. For Gaming, board games, consoles, and outdoor sports outshine the computer market, especially when we're talking about old machines.
Create a ParentsTech magazine so that parents don't start screaming when the kid opens up a web page at localhost, when they told Computers 4 Kids that under no circumstances would they get the machine if it had Internet access. And then of course the parents go out into the world trying to sue Localhost.com whom they believe is a division of Apache Inc. I can see it now, Dad: "Get them Indians off that computer now, missy."
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
- It is impossible for a user to ever have the window decorations off screen - thus the user will always be able to close, minimize, and resize the window.
- It is absolutely, incredibly, in-yer-face clear which winndow has the key focus.
- A "Log out" button that's obvious.
- Solid as a rock.
Magnet-move, fancy animations, blah blah blah, are all worthless for a n00b-WM. I am looking for such a WM to use on computers for seniors. So far I've been using window maker, but it fails badly on counts 1, 2, and 3.Replacement installers that put the latest Red Hat distributions on older systems (~Pentium w/ 32MB RAM). It installs light-weight X-Server, called TinyX (formerly kdrive) and desktop.
See their software database for some applications with low resource requirements.
It's not really a question of which distribution, as all distributions tend to include the same core packages and you don't have to install what you don't need or what you don't have sufficient disk space, RAM or CPU cycles for.
The problem with running modern distributions on modern hardware is that modern "integrated desktop enviroments" such as KDE and Gnome, and modern browsers such as Mozilla, are very heavy on features and eye candy, and all that tends to consume the resources listed above.
For example: I remember running the Fvwm2 window manager on a 2.0 kernel with Netscape 4, on an old 486DX2/66MHz with just 32MB EDO RAM - and it was pretty snappy. Introducing KDE version 1 slowed things down a bit, but a new machine with an AMD K6-II/233Mhz and 64MB SDRAM solved that problem.
However I'm now running KDE 3.1.1 and Mozilla 1.3 on a 2.4.20 kernel and even though this is on a Athlon Thunderbird/1.2GHz with 256MB SDRAM at 133MHz FSB, I'm having serious problems with memory management and UI response times. My older boxes which I use for file server duties (nothing more powerful than a Pentium/166MHz) are still fine though, even when I fire up one of the older window managers.
So my advice to you is, if you're hardware limited, to put together your own cut-down distro CD's based an any current distribution you like (Debian would probably be the best for this purpose with Slackware a close second) but leaving out the heavyweight desktop packages (those which come with an object framework and a bunch of background demons) and all the Kapplications and Gapplications that require them.
Does this suck? Yes, it does. You can blame the lazy programmers who don't give a damn about memory requirements or people with older hardware.
The good news is that you can still have all the server packages, all the nifty GNU command-line stuff, gvim, a good modern lightweight browser (Phoenix/Firebird?), all of Perl, a lightweight desktop like Fvwm2, xv for viewing images, a load of basic X and Motif apps...all the functionality is there, in fact all you are really missing is fancy motion video viewers and some worthless eye candy.
qvwm is a not-so-famous, lightweight, customizable window manager that is designed to emulate the look and feel on Microsoft Windows9x. Yes, many have problems like that, but I think it suits many situations, like:
- getting new computer users comfortable with a GUI similar to the one they're most likely to encounter in the real world
- maintaining a consistent desktop in a heterogeneous computing environment
I've been using qvwm for a couple of years now with no problems. Oh, and it's internationalized, too. Check it out at www.qvwm.org
Then again, kids really love the Game iso. Show them Pingus 0.6 and you'll have a few hours extra on your hands (only problem is that they might commandeer your PC to play it on...)
Another option would be to grab a new shiny Xbroadcast minimodule, giving you the option of one XDMCP server and a network of Xclients. Easy administrating once the server has been set up, centralised logging in, and a X client can work on a Pentium 100 without breaking a sweat. Throw in Knoppix hardware detection and no need to install anything on the clients (livecd's people, pay attention) and you have a sure winner.
Yeah, i really need a life, but honestly, making your own liveCD's is nearly as addicting as nethack. Oooo, off for another iso...
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I've used XFce on everything from a 486 to a P-4. It'll be snappy no mattery where you run it. It's not too hard to get used to, and almost never crashes.
If you want even less resource consumption, go for VTWM. I've also used it on everything from a 486 to a P-4, and it's even faster than XFce, and not too much more difficult to figure out. We use it at the Earlham College CS department on our Red Hat Linux P-4 clients, and it really flies.