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A Newbie's Guide To A Lo-Fat Linux Desktop 352

Posted by Hemos from the lean-and-mean dept.
A reader writes:"This article is what I needed a few years ago, when I first started playing with Linux. It's about building a fast and usable desktop using software that doesn't need a squillion horsepower." Good article if you are putting together an older machine to run as a dedicated box, or what to cobble together a terminal with spare parts.
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A Newbie's Guide To A Lo-Fat Linux Desktop More

A Newbie's Guide To A Lo-Fat Linux Desktop

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  • lo-fat? (Score:4, Funny)

    by The Turd Report ( 527733 ) <the_turd_report@hotmail.com> on Friday December 28, 2001 @07:14PM (#2760818) Homepage Journal
    Looking at the average linux user, I don't think lo-fat is in their vocabulary. (or diet)

  • there are distros for this purpose (Score:4, Informative)

    by Frothy Walrus ( 534163 ) on Friday December 28, 2001 @07:20PM (#2760839)
    building a low-fat box is a snap. just install a distro which is obviously devoid of bells and whistles. the bloated distros like Red Hat and Mandrake and SUSE look totally retarded next to little powerhouses like slackware and stripped-down debian.

    or, if you want a beautiful pure-UNIX box with unbeatable package management and outstanding security, install NetBSD (my favorite :).
    • Mod the original post up people!

      The reason I run debian and shy away from distros like RH and Mandrake is to be able to keep my computer waist slim, and its diet clean and lean.

      I don't know about slackware, but debian does the job admirably. I love it and no it's not really hard to set up. Just go to #debian irc and ask questions, you'll get nice answers.

      PPA, the girl next door.
      • > The reason I run debian and shy away from
        > distros like RH and Mandrake is to be able to
        > keep my computer waist slim, and its diet clean
        > and lean.

        Hmm, let's see:

        1) buy linux CD, and some coffee to go with it.
        2) come home, place CD on desk, sit down.
        3) reboot with CD, cool yourself with a soda.
        4) *think* about package selection, with a coffee
        5) relax while it installs, with a bag of candy/doridos.
        6) celebrate installation with a cold beer and pizza.
        7) tweak system, freshen breath with thinkgeek mints.

        Guys, computers don't get fat.
      • I don't know about slackware, but debian does the job admirably. I love it and no it's not really hard to set up.

        I really don't quite understand where Debian got its reputation for having such a difficult installer. I mean, sure it's a bit tough for Mom and Dad to puzzle out, but for anyone with any sort of *nix experience its a piece of cake.

        And yet, these are the people always bitching about the supposed difficulty.

        Hell, look at me; I'm a total newbie to Linux, more of a BSD guy. I decided to try out Debian for the m68k on a wacky old Mac I had lying around, and managed to get everything up and running without too much of a hassle. And if an idiot like me can do that on a weird hardware platform (Q950 Mac with the SCSI problems) and an OS that he doesn't understand, anyone savvy enough to have heard of Debian ought to be able to pull it off.

        --saint

      • Re:there are distros for this purpose (Score:5, Interesting)

        by kaisyain ( 15013 ) on Saturday December 29, 2001 @12:52AM (#2761491)
        I use debian and generally like it.

        But last time I checked installing apache under debian requires installing libmysql first (explain that one to me). Installing postfix requires installing sasl, ldap, pcre, and mysql libs. Try installing any of the courier suit in a "waist slim" state. Debian wants to install telnetd and inetd out-of-the-box and I can't remove netkit-inetd because netbase depends on it. Samba requires CUPS even though I don't own a printer. CUPS in turn makes me install tiff libraries. I need to install db2 for man and perl but I need db3 for postfix. Vim and links require I have gpm installed even though there is no mouse on the computer.

        All this is on a relatively bare bones server. Debian is nice but "waist slim" it is not.
    • i can't use distros like Red Hat or Mandrake these days. they've added so much bloat in the last couple of years that they've removed many of the reasons i fell in love with UNIX in the first place. simplicity has given way to making a desperate attempt at jumping into the desktop market (which is currently estimated at 1%... way to go).

      if i wanted 2.6G of eye candy on my hard drive, infesting my core memory and gobbling up CPU time, i'd just install Windows XP. i'm glad there are still distros which value a small footprint.

      • Re:Red Hat and the like are killing Linux (Score:5, Informative)

        by lactose99 ( 71132 ) on Friday December 28, 2001 @08:12PM (#2761016)
        I don't know how much familiarity you have with Mandrake, but I've been using it as my desktop OS on 3 boxes since 7.1. You've ALWAYS had the option to deinstall most of the bloat during the install, and it even removes the dependencies for you as well! Every time I've installed it (7.1, 7.2, 8.0, and 8.1), I have simply deselected the qt libraries to get rid of all KDE/qt stuff which I don't really have a use for. Then, just deselect gnome-libs and all the GNOME stuff dies too. Now usually I manually re-add gnome-libs and gnome-libs-devel by themseleves so I can run Gnome apps, and still not have all (of what I consider) the bloat of the GNOME and KDE desktops. You can also opt to install using only the install disk (as opposed to the supplemental disks 2 and 3 with 8.1), to further reduce apps.

        In the end, an rpm -qa, then an rpm -qi on each "questionable" package helps me to remove packages that don't sound/look after the install.

        These distros aren't "killing Linux", they're just doing what they should be doing-- showing new users the wealth of open source and free software programs available with a wonderful free OS. If you don't like the extra crap, then feel free to not install it/deinstall it later.

        I'd rather a newbie have more apps to play with, then him get a stripped-down Linux box with no 'fun' programs and having him ask where all the real software is. Linux could use more desktop market share, and more applications with a default install help to fuel that.
    • It just takes a little work (if you don't trust mandrake's little slider-bar in the install)

      I personally use Mandrake with ROX-Filer and Windowmaker as an environment. It was nice having all of the packages I would normally have to download and compile on my own already included.

    • It's funny you mention slack and debian, because those are the first two distros I tried to install on a 486 I bought expressly for the purpose of playing with linux about two years ago. Guess what happened? It was a disaster. I ran into lots of hardware snags and had no idea what to do.

      I started with zipslack since I had a zip drive but not a cdburner at the time. I got it working from the zip drive, but I couldn't get it installed right on the hard drive for some reason that I've since forgotten. Then I broke down and bought the debian box. The installation went ok, even if it was a bit confusing, until we got to XF86Config.

      Ye flipping gods, what a nightmare that was. I had no idea how much memory the ancient video card in my $40 486 machine had, hell I couldn't even figure out the model number. And it took me a really long time to find the horizontal and vertical specs for my monitor online.

      Someone please do tell me if this is now easier with debian. And in fairness, I was using a very stripped down version of slackware. But, being a newbie, what did I know?

      Redhat is better for newbies simply because of the hardware autodetection. I just wish they would install blackbox by default instead of kde/gnome.
      • Someone please do tell me if this is now easier with debian.


        It isn't. If you don't know exactly what's in your box, and you're not an expert -- Even people who would normally be comfortable with a Linux desktop, for the most part, aren't up to ripping apart their computers and scouring the net for the model numbers -- you'll never get your hardware set up properly.


        On a box where I don't know the hardware, my first move is to do an install of Mandrake. I write down all the drivers loaded, etc., and then wipe it and install Debian. But, of course, that's not something that a newbie would want or be able to do -- so in their case, they ought to just stick with Mandrake (or Red Hat, or whatever, although IME mandrake has the best hardware detection.)


        Are there any of the 'minimal distributions' combined with a good installer that does a decent job of hardware autodetection? I might be convinced to switch to it, if it could get me away from the silly, two-step, annoying dance I have to do.

      • The installation went ok, even if it was a bit confusing, until we got to XF86Config.

        Ye flipping gods, what a nightmare that was.
        [...]
        Someone please do tell me if this is now easier with debian.

        Yes and no. Debian still has the same installer it always had, and many folks feel this installer is not newbie-friendly. I know two people who tried it and hate it, but I do okay with it.

        But the major part of your nightmare was getting XFree86 to work, and that has indeed gotten better. XFree86 version 4.x has much improved config files and much improved detection of hardware, and the Debian install takes advantage of this.

        I would still say that most newbies should have a guru do the initial Debian install for them. Once it is installed, Debian is a joy to use and administer, especially with a high-speed connection to the Internet.

        I do agree that the installer for Progeny is better, but that is only if it works. I had a friend run the Progeny installer, and when it tried to auto-detect his GeForce2 video card, it exploded, leaving Progeny half-installed. I should have scrubbed everything and just run the plain Debian installer from the beginning, but instead I installed aptitude and then went over all the packages by hand, fixing the configs or installing missing stuff, and it took forever. (When I was done he had a Woody system, not a Progeny system, because I changed his sources.list to point to a Debian mirror instead of to Progeny.)

        Corel Linux, based on Debian but with a cool newbie-friendly graphical installer, also has a problem with GeForce video cards. Maybe 2.x fixed it, but with 1.x the graphical install would just hang, and there was no non-graphical installer! The official recommended workaround was to install some other video card Corel's installer could deal with, do the install, then swap in the GeForce and manually configure XFree86.

        The plain-text Debian install starts to look better after the friendly ones bite you a few times. But the Mandrake installer starts to look even more better, because in my experience, it just works. If only we could get the Mandrake guys to port their installer to Debian!

        steveha
  • Good article if you are putting together an older machine to run as a dedicated box, or what to cobble together a terminal with spare parts. Or, if you just want to make your 1.6GHZ totally SCREAM.

  • FVWM (Score:3, Interesting)

    by VAXman ( 96870 ) on Friday December 28, 2001 @07:28PM (#2760866)
    Why not just use FVWM instead of that fancy IceWM or the other new window managers? It's very fast, small, and configurable. I'm running on a 1.2 GHz Athlon / 128 MB, and FVWM works great for me.

    Does anybody actually use those silly little file managers? IMHO, they just get in the way - why not just use the command line?

    • Re:FVWM (Score:2, Redundant)

      by sarcast ( 515179 )
      Does anybody actually use those silly little file managers? IMHO, they just get in the way - why not just use the command line?

      Not everyone likes to use the command line for every little thing. I know it's powerful, you know it's powerful, but the newbie who is using linux for the first time needs that "silly little file manager" to get things done. That's why Linux is so great, you can use what you want and ditch what you don't.

    • Re:FVWM (Score:2)

      by nbvb ( 32836 )
      Agreed!

      I have a Sun Ultra 60 on my desktop, and I use WindowMaker. FVWM works well too, but I like the NeXTstep feel of WM. :-)

      Agreed -- small window managers are the best!

      --NBVB
    • FVWM is small, fast and configurable - but perhaps _too_ configurable. I haven't used it since Slackware 3.x, but I remember the default setup being rather crufty and awkward (at least to a new user). Icewm has a good default configuration which is easy to tweak. You can just start using it and customize it later when you feel like it. Generally the default setup just feels more solid than fvwm 1's or fvwm 2's default setup. Icewm's motto is: Feel is more important than look.
      • I just switched to FVWM after reading this and I really like it. Getting alt-tab window switching (one of the few things I actually like about MS windows) to work is now trivial (unlike the fvwm that shipped w/ RH6.0 in spring 1999 - you could do it but it took messing around, now it's simple). I suspect I may stay with this (so far just testing it out). I've been a KDE junkie up until now. Only problem (this on RH 7.2) - many menu items for apps don't seem to work. Possibly refer to programs which aren't present. But that's not fvwm's fault, most likely.
    • Since when is a 1.2 GHz machine "low-end"? :)

      Seems targeted exactly at me 'n' my PII 233....

    • ctwm (Score:3, Interesting)

      by "Zow" ( 6449 )

      I can beat that: ctwm [ctwm.dl.nu], aka Claude's Tab Window Manager. It's a modified version of the vererable TWM to give such modern amenities as virtual desktops, animated gliphs, and the like. I've used it off and on for about 7 years - tried other window managers, but I just keep coming back. It hasn't changed much in that time, but I think that's a good thing: it's stable as a rock - hasn't crashed, hung or gone into a funky state on me once. And it does all this with negliable resources: I used to run it on NCD X-terminals and the like and it ran like a champ. Okay, it started to drag on a Sun 3/60, but what wouldn't? On my modern 1200x1600 24-bit desktop it's using just 1820kB resident, 3204kB total memory, which is on par with tcsh. And since I've logged in 9 hours ago it's used just 23 seconds of time on my 600MHz box (and that's with animated gliphs).

      The downside? Someone who isn't used to a traditional X environment will be lost - it's not the place to start someone who just came from Windows, but once you get used to it and customize it for your needs, you just forget that it's there. All the configuration is through a single rc file and the man page documents the options really well. The only downside to its configurability is that there are so many options that it takes a long time to play with them and find what you like.

      Oh, and the reason I started using it was that all my friends were sick of TWM (which was the default wm in our CS department back then) so they all started using FVWM. I liked FVWM's features (esp. virtual desktops) and configurability, but I didn't like the overhead (especially since I did end up on X-terminals and old Suns quite a bit), so I searched around and found ctwm.

      My 2 cents,

      -"Zow"

    • Re:FVWM (Score:2, Interesting)

      by foonf ( 447461 )
      Why not just use FVWM instead of that fancy IceWM or the other new window managers?


      I will not argue that FVWM is pretty damn cool. But, especially considering how it looks (which is bad, any way you shake it), its really only marginally qualifies as fast and light.

      Regarding IceWM, it has an incredibly usable default configuration, and IIRC binaries for it run under 400k! And its fully themable to boot.

      Blackbox is the other oft-mentioned choice, its more geared to the user whose idea of a GUI involves switching between Xterms running Emacs, and its theming is rather more limited than IceWM (basically you just pick your gradients, no customizable widgets location/functions or pixmaps or anything), but its very, very fast.

      And yes, both of these are, properly themed, beautiful. FVWM is not, and it is larger and slower.

  • Start with X? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Telastyn ( 206146 ) on Friday December 28, 2001 @07:30PM (#2760875)
    Maybe I'm showing signs of age, but I know how much knowing DOS helped me when I moved to win95 as it came out. I knew how to do things, and more importantly how things worked rather than how windows showed it to me.

    So when I installed linux (SuSE at first) I benefitted greatly from using just console for a short while (mostly because I couldn't setup X properly, but that's another thing). I learned how things worked in this new system before I encountered window managers that assumed I knew such things.

    I certainly understand the need for lightweight WM's for some machines, but for learning purposes the only thing they can provide is maybe Netscape to help files. Of course imo someone should use the system they are comfortable with to browse help, because god knows the easiest way to get frustrated is having to fight with a machine while trying to find help.

  • Why no mention of APT? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Nailer ( 69468 ) on Friday December 28, 2001 @07:32PM (#2760883)
    Where to Get Packages
    You'll find a lot of this stuff is included on the installation cd's of most distro's, or you can follow the links. Wherever possible, these point to the project's homepage, or else to rpmfind's download site. If you're using something other than a RedHat style distro, you may have to backtrack a bit from the rpmfind sites to get the right version.

    No offence, but fuck backtracking :). There's been a billion tools to download apps and their dependencies, and Ximian's Red Carpet and APT are two of the best - between the two there's very little software which isn't available packaged to work on a Red Hat box.

    Best of all, freshrpms.net is now available via APT. Freshrpms is an invaluable source of this kind of stuff - eg, if you're into DVD, its always up to date with the latest Ogle, Xine, Transcoder and Drip packages. Furthermore, Matthias from Freshrpms does requests: just name the software and he'll package it. He's also a bloody nice guy and writes tutorials on how to package properly too, asking for very little in return. Freshrpms is easily the best Red Hat package source out there.

    Anyway, get APT here [rpmfind.net]. Install it, then stick the following in your /etc/apt/sources.list

    rpm http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/apt redhat-7.2-i386/redhat os
    rpm http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/apt redhat-updates-7.2/redhat os
    rpm http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/apt redhat-extra-7.2/redhat extra
    rpm http://apt.freshrpms.net freshrpms/7.2 main

    rpm-src http://apt.freshrpms.net freshrpms/7.2 main
    rpm-src http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/apt redhat-7.2-i386/redhat os
    rpm-src http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/apt redhat-updates-7.2/redhat os
    rpm-src http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/apt redhat-extra-7.2/redhat extra

    As you probably know, Ximian Gnome including Red Carpet is available from ximian.com. Combined with APT they provide a way to run up to date software on a stable distribution using standard packages, which as far as I know isn't available from anyone but Connectiva, Red Hat, and Polished Linux Distribution.

  • Kernel (Score:4, Informative)

    by bartyboy ( 99076 ) on Friday December 28, 2001 @07:32PM (#2760884)
    He forgot a couple of things: the kernel and libs.

    Zipslack would probaby be best for this base system. Or a stripped-dopy (minimal install) of Slack or Deb.
  • Seriously - most sparc machines can be had for pretty cheap these days, and debian is still supported well on them. And debian usually only installs absolutely what you need to survive. Its also nice for older machines like 68k macs and sparc 32 platforms since they usually come with small hard drives.

  • Dont want to start a flame war (Score:5, Informative)

    by Zule_Boy ( 45951 ) on Friday December 28, 2001 @07:41PM (#2760925) Homepage
    Working in a large ISP environment, I have really learned to love A nice clean FreeBSD install. Anymore I find myself taking a Linux Box (mostly RedHat) and stripping out all the packages and going and rebuilding them the way they should have been. You may also find yourself rebuilding servers with a BSD based system just cause.
    In my opinon, you have to try as many UNIXs as you can. get an extra box. Install anything else on it than your normal install. play. repeat. There is more to computing than Linux. I just saw someone get modded down in another thread for mentioning Solaris. Solaris rocks. He got modded cause Solaris aint Linux.
    You need the right tool for the right job. Square pegs dont fit in round holes, and so on. Once you do BSD, you will never go back. I have heard of people falling in love with Debian also. YMMV
    • Agreed.
      Freebsd was a beautiful thing for me, as it weaned me from the bloat of redhat.

      I have since switched to debian, but that is only because I need the nvidia binary drivers for my main system, and I like my systems to behave exactly the same way.

      If you don't need those damnable drivers, there is no reason not to use *bsd. They are way more old-school unix-y, and seem more concerned with "correctness" then the linux camp.

      Cuchullain
    • Anymore I find myself taking a Linux Box (mostly RedHat) and stripping out all the packages and going and rebuilding them the way they should have been

      I see comments similar to these so often anymore. People, take the time to learn kickstart. You really can make RedHat installs as lean as you want them to be. I spent 3 years on Slackware, and 3 years on RH. It's hard to beat Slackware for thin, but you can do some pretty thin setups with RH.
    • I just saw someone get modded down in another thread for mentioning Solaris. Solaris rocks.

      I'm not reluctant to admit that my experience with Solaris might be somewhat limited. I only use it as a desktop on the University, but from that single experience I certainly would never say anything like "Solaris rocks". They have Solaris 8 running on Ultra Sparcs at 500Mhz with 1.25 GB of RAM ans still things seem slow. I got an out-of-memory error while making a very simple movie with Matlab the other day. Mathematica can't happily scroll the view if there are images involved and compiling (java, c, etc.) seems dogslow compared to my Linux box at home. Maybe Solaris does rock, but I sure wouldn't have come to that conclusion from my experience.

  • erm ... some things are a little stupid ... (Score:4, Informative)

    by SuperDuG ( 134989 ) <<kt.celce> <ta> <eb>> on Friday December 28, 2001 @07:44PM (#2760929) Homepage Journal
    First off ... if you want small and fast ... Try peanut linux ... Website [ibiblio.org] or ISO's [linuxiso.org]. "Just 99 Mb of data contain this already pre-software configured OS with a spectacular GUI for the most versatile operating system available today!. - Quoted from their page.

    Now for older boxen ... the best way to make them efficient is to follow the Keep It Simple Silly method of making a working box. Win95-Lite was made for this exact reason ... but that's just if you want win95 ... For linux I would have to recommend Slackware or Debian ... after a base install you have very little bloat and very few apps that you won't need. Apt makes it real nice to find and install, but slack also has a decent package list to choose from.

    You may also want to look into the BSD's ... all of them have a very bland base install and all of them run the latest greatest stuff.

    Along with being so great all of these (except slack) offer net installs, so all you need is a disk drive to boot the things up ... so if the CD has crapped out (which it has on many old computers) you can still do a full install on the net.

    People are saying FVWM or other things like that ... SawFish and BlackBox were made to be VERY lightweight window managers and like windowmaker are very customizable and since they are so small ... they take up a very small memory foot print.

    The thing would also make a cool Home Server, Make it into a router, webserver, email server, and file server ... perfect ...

    Lastly ... you could set it up with a VNC client and use it that way as a terminal system. I think the one thing that needs to be realized is that old boxes are far from useless.

    • BSDs as an option. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by saintlupus ( 227599 )
      You may also want to look into the BSD's ... all of them have a very bland base install and all of them run the latest greatest stuff.

      I ran my server (blue.roadflares.org) for months handing HTTP and SMTP for my domain on a 230 meg hard drive in a Quadra 700.

      That's ancient, to those of you who don't use Macs. Roughly equivalent to a low end 486.

      The operating system? NetBSD.

      If you've got _seriously_ old hardware, like that Quadra, or the 486 that's serving roadflares.org now, or the IPC I've got here, try Net or Open BSD. They run like champs.

      --saint

  • A few more suggestions (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Otter ( 3800 ) on Friday December 28, 2001 @07:44PM (#2760933) Journal
    My Linux box at work is a PowerMac 7200/75 MHz that gives me snappier performance than my 1200 MHz Athlon running Mandrake at home. I like the tips here but have a few more suggestions:
    • Use an older distro. I suggested this the last time this topic came up here, and generally got flamed for it, but I still think it's worth considering. If you're only running CLI or old style X apps, you may find it a lot easier to use Red Hat 5.0 and add the newer pieces you want than to try to cut one of the newer megadistros down to size. New distros don't even come with stuff like xplaycd or xfm. Just made sure to update for any security holes.
    • Try Gtk only apps. A lot of the utilities like xchat and grip run perfectly happily without Gnome, pointing out just how little you (or me, anyway) need all that hyped communication framework bloat. KDE apps don't cut down nearly as well (I'll leave it to the zealots to argue whether this is a win for KDE's superior integration or GNOME's modularity...) but your old distro will have KDE 1.x which is usable and really fast.
    • I must put in a plug for WindowMaker. It's all the desktop I need, whereas the really minimal WMs are too little for me, and still flies.
    • I also like Xenon as a text editor. It's lighter weight than Nedit, and is nice if you want a minimal X editor.
    • Use an older distro. I suggested this the last time this topic came up here, and generally got flamed for it, but I still think it's worth considering. If you're only running CLI or old style X apps, you may find it a lot easier to use Red Hat 5.0 and add the newer pieces you want than to try to cut one of the newer megadistros down to size. New distros don't even come with stuff like xplaycd or xfm. Just made sure to update for any security holes.

      Security - that's just the problem with older, unsupported distributions like rh5.x. There would be so many holes that would have to be plugged that you'd effectively end up with a new distro anyway. That's the best case, assuming you were willing to scour several years worth of bugtraq vulnerabilities and do a lot of manual labour yourself. Why bother with all the hassle, when a newer distro does all the heavy lifting for you?

      I've installed Slackware 8 on a few older systems and I'm very impressed with it. Very lean and stable. It gives you good control over the install process, and it's easy to squeeze it onto small hard drives and old computers. And it's new and still supported, meaning that security updates are only a download away.

  • Nedit lightweight ?? (Score:4, Informative)

    by blakestah ( 91866 ) <blakestah@gmail.com> on Friday December 28, 2001 @07:45PM (#2760935) Homepage
    If he is really looking lo-fat, he is kinda screwed.

    Nedit is not bad, but a terminal based editor will KILL it for RAM usage. Like vi, or Microemacs, or joe, or even jed.

    IceWM is OK, but blackbox is the screamer lightweight favorite Window Manager.

    For a file manager use the command line. Or MC - another terminal based utility (GUI utilities chunk out 8-10 MB RAM just for playing).

    For graphics viewing, skip ee. Raster is cool and all, but his imlib1.0 sucked for RAM usage. Try imlib2 and ee2, or eog. Either minimzes RAM usage while viewing images. GQview is pretty good, too.

    All browsers blow chunks for using RAM, especially konqueror and mozilla. Opera is the clear lo-fat winna. Or lynx, or w3m.

    And work on X - hard. Make a beautiful image your desktop background, and give up 20-30 Megs of RAM. Change it to a flat color (xsetroot -solid black) and you gain a lot back. Change X to 16 bit, and/or lose some resolution and you will gain more. I guess it all depends on what compromises you are willing to make. You can always hit Ctrl-Alt-F2 and save even more.

    • re: blackbox (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Xzzy ( 111297 )
      > but blackbox is the screamer lightweight favorite
      > Window Manager.

      Maybe in the current pantheon of "modern" window managers, but it still ranks pretty low against some ancestors.

      The fvwm breed, including afterstep 1.0, are immensely easy on the memory (heck I ran as 1.0 just fine on my 486 with four megs of ram all those years ago), and support a greater feature set than blackbox.

      BB suffers from a serious case of "my way or no way" from the programmer. The manager is tuned to his tastes strictly and without deviation, which makes it hard to tune things to satisfy.

      afterstep 1.0 otoh supports images (bb doesn't), key bindings (bb doesn't without added modules), and when I tested afterstep actually used less memory than bb. bb also does some other odd wheel-reinventings, like the bsetroot command.. why isn't xsetroot good enough? bb also has an odd homegrown config/theme setup, while fvwm and afterstep benefit from a very old and very documented configuration scheme.

      Incidentially I did this testing earlier today.. heh, quiet day at work.
      Moral of the story being, afterstep 1.0 may be 4-5 years old now but it can still give blackbox a run for it's money.

      • Re: blackbox (Score:3, Interesting)

        by nuintari ( 47926 )
        Yes man, I still use AfterStep, its the only window manager that offers so much configurability, with such a little memory footprint. But I think a lot of people are turned off by the fact that ya have to write the config files by yourself, and there are a ton of them.

        But I still wonder what the appeal of the heavy weights is, I can run afterstep on a 25 mhz machine, gnome wants more power than my dual 400 mhz has to offer.

  • Video players, fm and word processing (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Jacek Poplawski ( 223457 ) on Friday December 28, 2001 @07:59PM (#2760973)
    This article is strange for me. While icewm is great choice, I don't understand why he wrote about mtv and xanim. I think that software is bad, very bad.

    Thanks to avifile author we have many free and powerfull players today. Please try mplayer [sf.net] and avifile [sf.net] if you don't know it.

    How xanim or binary-only mtv can be better than free alternatives? Last time I checked it was even impossible to rewind a movie there!

    XWC as fm? Well, ok, but I preffer emelfm [sf.net], which is much better than mc for me (try to use mc in directory with 10000 files!).

    Last but not least - word processing. What about LyX [lyx.org]? OK, there is kword and abiword, but there are fat. IMHO LyX is much more powerfull than real MS Word, and it's fast and light. The only problem with LyX is xforms :-(

    So - it's nice to see that kind of article, but I think choices are not best there.

  • The article suggests Netscape as the best browser for a 32 meg machine (which I guess is what counts as 'low-memory' these days). But if you really want a small but usable browser, try Dillo [sourceforge.net]. It worked beautifully last time I tried it - apart from a problem logging in to Slashdot, which was enough to make me go back to Mozilla :-(.

  • Linux From Scratch (Score:4, Informative)

    by J'raxis ( 248192 ) on Friday December 28, 2001 @08:12PM (#2761020) Homepage
    Linux From Scratch [linuxfromscratch.org]. Not for newbies, but you can make an extremely small distro yourself.

  • More usable, and still just as light (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SCHecklerX ( 229973 ) <greg@gksnetworks.com> on Friday December 28, 2001 @08:22PM (#2761039) Homepage
    for the Window Manager, use Windowmaker [windowmaker.org] and for the filemanager/pinboard, use Rox Filer [sourceforge.net].

    And whatever you do, DON't run KDE apps!

    • I'm running FreeBSD 4.4-RELEASE with windowmaker .80 . I find it very quick to use.

      For example, I type ctrl-alt-t and I get a terminal (rxvt -fg green -bg black +sb --geometry 80x50). Or I can hit ctrl-alt-r for a run dialogue.

      If I want to dial the net I hit ctrl-alt-UP. (rxvt -fg green -bg black +sb -geometry 50x8 -e /usr/sbin/ppp -background default).

      If I want to dial down, I hit ctrl-alt-DOWN. (killall ppp)

      My dock looks pretty attractive too with WmCalClock (/usr/ports/x11-clocks/wmcalclock). If I double click it, I get jpilot.

      Below that is wmfire (/usr/ports/sysutils/wmfire) for eye candy / system load. Then comes my mixer, wmmixer (/usr/ports/audio/wmmixer), and XMMS (/usr/ports/audio/xmms).

      With a little bit of playing with the menus (the drag and drop menu configuration is great) you can organize your programs quite easily.


      Hope any of this is useful.

      -Peter

  • Please. KDE apps are bloated and depend on having a bunch of useless crap running in the background. Abiword and Gnumeric are nice and light, but I use Star Office, since I have the horsepower :)

    I didn't see a mention of a good email client (Mozilla doesn't count) And again, he likes kmail?? For a lightweight desktop??? I would highly recommend Sylpheed [good-day.net] as a fast, light, easy to use, yet powerful (enough) mail client.

    There are so many problems with this article, that I'll stop now, I'm sure the rest of you have already pointed them out (time for me to read the comments now :)

    • I didn't see a mention of a good email client (Mozilla doesn't count)

      The lack of a spell checker is a HUGE stumbling block for Mozilla. Other than send and receive mail, that is the ONLY feature _I_ really care about in an e-mail client. I was able to hack in the netscape spell checker into an earlier build, but that did not work in the last couple revs. Digging in deeper it looks like Netscape did/can't release that due to 3rd party problems. Got more info and it might be possible to use ispell or pspell, but seems know one knows if they can use it based on licenses or compatiblity issues. Moz will be at 1.0 long before I could puzzle out from ground zero how to add to the codebase (in a positive manner), but it looks like there is a vaccum there for someone to lead a team - expecially us mozilla newbies wanting to help.
  • I guess the main reason I likw IceWM is the taskbar and 'start button.' I know it seems lame but I'm used to that setup and it seems to work the best (and fastest) when I'm multitasking. I use MacOS 9 at school and I hate it, it seems too damn clunky in my opinion, and it seems like many Window Managers emulate MacOS in a way. So is there any other WMs like IceWM that don't take a lot of memory. I'm planning to set up a few desktop machines with a P90 and 32MB of ram.

  • My school Lab (Score:2, Informative)

    by Beowulf_Boy ( 239340 )
    I am the Co-director of the Clermont Northeastern HighSchool Technology Dept. (one hell of a title, eh?)
    I had to setup a lab for the middle school using some p1 200's with 32megs of ram.
    I used Redhat 7.1 XFS and IceWM.
    They are used solely for internet surfing,
    and I put Netscape Navigator 4.78 on there.
    The CPU usage bar has yet to spike past half way.
    I turned off all unneeded services, even Sendmail.
    I even decided against using ipchains, because they are already behind a firewall.
  • Granted I could use microwindows (nano-x) or picogui but nither has a html3 compliant web browser available that weighs in at less than 2meg. does anyone know of a webbrowser out ther that is at least html3.0 compliant and is small-fast? I dont care about java,javascript,flash,whatever. dillo is cool except it's html2 compliant only (center tags and background color not implimented yet.. and I say yet becauseI am sure it will eventually.)
    • Opera 5 static weighs in under 3MB (tgz). Dynamicly linked build is under 2MB (tgz). A little heftier than you're after but you get the bonus of good HTML 4 support and decent stylesheet support. Closed source though. Netscape 3 weighs in at 3MB compressed. Netscape 2 weighs in at 2 MB compressed. Given those choices I'd favor Opera. But there does seem to be a gap between the 'modern' brosers and the very simple.

  • i've been looking for articles such as this on th web with not much success...

    - anyone know of similar articles on th web (lightweight gnu/linux, lightweight computing) or even whole websites dedicated to th subject?

    thanks in advance

  • best distro for this (Score:5, Informative)

    by staeci ( 85394 ) on Friday December 28, 2001 @09:16PM (#2761166) Homepage Journal
    HowTo Build a Minimal Linux System from Source Code [netspace.net.au]

    Linux from Scratch [linuxfromscratch.org]

    Now if someone can tell me why programs (so far MAKEDEV and Lilo) won't run from
    harddrive /dev/hdd1 I'll be a happy little linuxer

  • ok, there's always lynx and w3m for lightweight web-browsing

    but my question is - what is th most lightweight, free software graphical web-browser out there? - nothing fancy, just functional please

    • I just loaded the latest 'familiar' distro onto my iPAQ pocket PC, and it came with a cool web browser I'd never heard of named dillo [sourceforge.net]. I don't know much about it, but it is fast, even on a handheld. It left Pocket IE in the dust.

      (BTW, I ran some Python-based benchmarks the iPAQ and it seems to have horsepower similar to that of a 66-MHz 486.)

      • i said thanks in advance but thanks again - just been looking at th dillo web-page and it looks to be exactly what i want - a functional, no bullshit web browser under th gpl

        looks like a mainly european development team which just serves to fuel my suspicion that there's a lot of good stuff going on in europe that slips under th radar

    • You can also build Konqueror without kde using qt/embedded. I think there are a couple projects based around this.. one of them is called "Netraider".
  • Lets see now, while LoFat's nice... how about this:

    20 megs RAM on a Linux 2.4.17 running 486/33 laptop.
    640x480 8-bit LCD (Compaq AVGA)
    XFree 3.x server

    I'm half tempted to recomile Xfree. :) Infact, I should document this triumph...

  • My way... (Score:5, Informative)

    by madleech ( 240267 ) on Friday December 28, 2001 @10:20PM (#2761279) Homepage
    Here's what i use.
    • ROX-Filer for the file manager. It manages desktop icons, and has a panel as well if you want one. It's based on Gtk+, but doens't involove any gnome.
      rox.sf.net [sf.net]
    • Oroborus for the window manager. It's default theme is beautiful and it is amazingly quick. Uses only xlib for drawing.
      www.kensden.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Oroborus/ [blueyonder.co.uk]
    • FSPanel, for F*ing Small Panel. The whole app is only 10k under linux! Plus it works and includes a pager (optional patch).
      www.chatjunkies.org/fspanel/ [chatjunkies.org]
    On my box it takes about 2 seconds to fully load everything! how's that for performance. KDE 2.1.0 took close to a minute to load.

  • Is it me or is this article not exactly useful? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by biglig2 ( 89374 ) on Friday December 28, 2001 @10:21PM (#2761280) Homepage Journal
    Flame on!

    "use GIMP for image editing"? Thanks guys, would never have thought of that one. Better yet: "install KDE even if you don';t use it as the apps are good"

    Look, I found in the back of my dead machine closet an old 386 laptop (woo, way back) and I want to set it up for my brother to encourage him to not email me instead of not calling, so I need a really low-fat linux. Whats the advice there? No PCMCIA or CD-ROM and about 4Mb of RAM, so KDE is out. Suspect X might be too. I'm going to try debian via floppy and fake a PPP connection via COM1 into my LAN for apt-get goodness.

    Also, since when have newbies needed guides to setting up unusual configs? I'm an experienced systems engineer, I run a laptop thats well documented, whose manufacturer puts millions into Linux, and happens to be a model Alan Cox personally owns. Despite all this, I can't get the fecking sound card to work. (It works now, because I wanted to listen to MP3 using it pver the holidays, so I uninstalled Linux and put Win2K on it, which detects and configures and makes work all the hardware out of the box) You have more problems than "newbies can't work out which window manager to put KDE on top of to save on space", people.

    That's it, from now on I'm drinking decaf.

  • I'm happy living in the past (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sunhou ( 238795 ) on Friday December 28, 2001 @10:52PM (#2761338)
    When I got RedHat 5.0 almost 4 years ago for my laptop, I used fvwm2 with the AnotherLevel macros, which were one of the defaults at the time.

    Now, on my latest desktop machines, I still use the same setup (although on a newer version of Linux). I had to copy over my old startup files to get the newer RedHat to fire up a desktop that looks like what I was used to. I also use this on a couple of 486's I have.

    With this setup, I get multiple screens if I want, a very thin title bar at the bottom (so it doesn't take up much real estate, very important to me), and I have programmed various function key combinations to warp to (and bring to the foreground) the various windows I use:
    • F5 goes to my chinese xterm with simplified characters window
    • F6 goes to my main local terminal window
    • F7 goes to my second local terminal window
    • F8 goes to my main terminal window which is logged into my office computer
    • F9 goes to my netscape window (or the next one, if I have multiple ones open, which I always do)
    • F10 goes to my emacs window
    • F11 lowers the current window
    • Ctrl-Shift-F5 goes to my chinese xterm with traditional characters
    • Ctrl-Shift-F7 goes to my xdvi window
    • Ctrl-Shift-F8 goes to my gv window
    • Ctrl-Shift-F9 goes to my xv window


    The sysadmin in my dept laughed when I told him about all that, but a few days later he told me he'd done the same thing, mapping a zillion function keys. Once you use them a bit and remember them, it's so much faster than the mouse (and he probably has about as much aversion to the mouse as I do).

    I tried to do all this function key mapping under Gnome a year or two ago, but couldn't figure out how to do it, so I gave up on it. Anyway, the stuff I do works fine under fvwm2 / Another Level, so there's nothing driving me to switch.
  • I installed suse 7.3 on my sparc 5 today, lets just say 3 hours later, KDE took 5 minutes to load, control panel also takes 5 minutes to load. OUCH!
    Back to Icewm, and at least its some what snappier.

    Side note, my sun blade 100 kept puking at random points of the suse install, that box will scream with kde when the linux is fully ported. BTW, damn it sun, support the creator 3d elite!

  • xwc seems to have disapeared (Score:3)

    by jmd! ( 111669 ) <jmd.pobox@com> on Saturday December 29, 2001 @12:02AM (#2761435) Homepage
    The filemanager he mentions seems to be bitroting. Can anyone recommend a windows explorer style file manager for X that I don't have to worry about eating my files? I just searched through freshmeat's 190 matches for "file manager", and found only one file manager that looked usable... and it was binary only.

    I normally don't care for such a thing. I get along fine with mv, bash/zsh's advanced replacements (for file in *.fred; do mv $file ${file%.fred}.barney; done), and a little perl script I cooked up to do regexp renaming (remv [turbogeek.org]). But occasionally a certain file management task comes along that leaves me begging for explorer.exe, and its in place edit, and its quick multifile selection that doesn't choke on quotes and spaces.

    Anything out there for me?
    • I use emelFM [sourceforge.net]. It seems pretty lightweight, offers a MC style interface and doesn't annoy me too greatly.
      • I hate two pane. I need a tree. Was Windows 95's explorer.exe the pinnacle of file manager design? They've since integrated the web browser, and added all this HTML cruft on the side that 99.9% of people don't know how to turn off (even computer savy friends of mine asked me to show them).

        Is its rename at least inline? Can I hit (eg) F2 and be editing the files name? No dialog. No clicking properties like in gmc. One button access to making the filename a text field. That's all I ask.

  • Some other options (Score:2, Interesting)

    by X-Nc ( 34250 )
    Another option for the WM is XFce [xfce.org]. It's got the speed of IceWM and Blackbox yet it has more power and capabilities than KDE or GNOME. No, I am not making this up. Go get it and try it. There is no desktop environment or window manager that can come close to matching half of the capibilities that XFce has. No bullshit; no hype. It's just true.

    For a file manager, XFtree, which comes as part of XFce, is increadable. You will not believe what it can do. And if you need any kind of connection to a WinXX network, XFsamba is increadable. There is no better Samba tool. Period. rox is good too, though.

    Dillo was mentioned and it is worth having a look at. It's very usable if you don't need frame support.

    Someone mentioned running text based tools as an option. I would have to say that the #1 file manager I use is mc in an xterm. And links in an xterm does great for web stuff.

  • very on-topic! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 7-Vodka ( 195504 ) on Saturday December 29, 2001 @12:36AM (#2761471) Journal
    Wow. I've recently had to deal with this in a big way. On vacation. Only computer i can use right now is a p200 toshiba laptop with 32MB of RAM and a 56k pcmcia modem.


    First thing I did was clear some room and d/l some floppy images and install debian ( for the first time! )


    Anyway, i'm used to kde. so I apt-get kde. When i boot into it UGH! it's slower than any computer i've ever used before!


    The big problem is the hard disk. I would wager it's slower than that of most 386's. It's CRAP. If the swap fills up more than 10MB that's it. it immediately begins to crawl slower than a slug over the salt plains.


    I had to apt-get blackbox and give that a go. It worked a charm. But, still a little disheartened by konqueror, which as it turns out, is more ram hungry than IE5, I decided to find another web browser. I found Dillo! Dillo is awesome. It's got some problems rendering and doesnt support any advanced features, but what do you want for 97k? I've been using it ever since. Even with several windows open it doesn't even touch swap!


    I also found that gtk programs like gaim are much less resource intensive than their kde equivalents.


    on a side note. Debian is awesome. My jaw dropped when i started using apt-get. Also, the distro seems very well put together. I love the little touches like the menu program which controls menus in all the WMs and DEs. Just using debian on this laptop has already made me vow to switch away from mandrake when i get back to my normal box. It's very weird that a distribution put together by volunteers has turned out to be my favourite, I've tried many others before sticking with mandrake because it's what i give out to my friends.


    Another side note. Although i hate windows, win95 actually runs quite well on this machine. It's crap but it's lean i guess.

    • Performance - It should be acceptably fast and stable on older hardware
    • Graphical Interface - most newbies and non-geeks prefer this to the command line
    • Functionality - It should do everything that normal users (whatever they are) expect of that type of app.
    • Ease of Installation - It should be reasonably simple to install, without needing kernel recompilation and without too many obscure dependencies.
    • Ease of Configuration - You shouldn't need to be a vi or scripting guru to knock it into shape
    • Ease of Use - It should be reasonably easy to learn the usage.

    Every Developer should read this list aloud to themselves 20 to 100 times a day and live as if it were immutable law. If they did, the idea of linux gaining a noticable share of the consumer market would be much closer to reality.

    JFMILLER

    p.s. for those of you who will claim that Linux is only for those who can figure out how to use it, I say to you, "You are not numerous enought to be signifacant in any world but your own"

  • As a sidenote, I run a dinky Cyrix 300+MHz with 128MB RAM and an all-in-one cheap PCChips motherboard. Not much power, but stabler than ANY of the windows machines that I've ever played with. I've had uptimes of up to 90 days with no problems in between cold boots to update recompiled kernels. I've also setup a lo-fat desktop system with some overlap with this person's setup. Except the following:

    Enlightenment (yes, I can run E without Gnome or any other other desktop for that matter on top). Themes for E, I think, are visually very appealing compared to IceWM. E doesn't have a taskbar like IceWM, you really have to rely on all your mouse buttons (left, middle and right) for app menus to pop-up. But I like this aspect since it keeps the desktop very clean.

    Wordperfect 8.0. There is still wp8 tar.gz files floating around there on the net to install. It's free for personal use and although it's not a full suite like StarOffice or the like, it still is fast and powerful. Because it's an older piece of software, there may be some problems with running it in newer rpm based distros. You'll have to install older glibc libs and ld-configs--they'll take care of that problem.

    Although it doesn't quite count as a word processor, LaTeX is well worth the effort to learn! Add this to pybliographer and bibtex and you have a setup that rivals Windows with Word and EndNote any day.

    He's right about text editors and user loyalties. I'm just nuts over my emacs (also another piece of software well worth learning).

    I used to use Eterm as my terminal, but has been supplanted by his choice, rxvt.

    For the web browser, if I can't use lynx, I usually use Netscape 4. Just about all the other browsers can't compare in speed and functionality.

    For the mail client, nothing beats Pine. I'm paranoid over all the email viruses being propagated by Outlook and clients similar to it. My motto is, "if it can't be sent as text, then it shouldn't be sent as email."


    I don't use KDE--it's too bloated for my system. Although I have Gnome installed, it's really just for the libs to run Gnome software such as gkrellm, gaim and pybliographer.

  • stick with plain X11 and screen-oriented pgms (Score:4, Informative)

    by markj02 ( 544487 ) on Saturday December 29, 2001 @02:32AM (#2761615)
    I'd recommend learning mutt [mutt.org] as the e-mail client, one of the screen oriented news readers (if you care about news), vim as a text editor, and links [browser.org] or lynx [browser.org] as a web browser. The "screen" program can be used to multiplex. If you want something more coherent, you can get most of that functionality within Emacs or Xemacs [xemacs.org]. All that stuff has some mouse support, but it also works great over dial-up and doesn't use a lot of resources by modern standards.

    If you want some graphics and multiple windows, X11 is actually not that heavy-weight, although Gnome and KDE are. Consider running plain X11 with "twm", "fvwm", or Oroborus [blueyonder.co.uk]. Of those, "twm" is ubiquitous, while oroborus is a little more modern. For minimal graphical web browsing, consider the "dillo" web browser, although it won't work on complex sites. You could also download Opera [operasoft.com], although it's commercial.

  • Ratpoison (Score:3, Informative)

    by Pete ( 2228 ) on Saturday December 29, 2001 @04:34AM (#2761820)
    I'm sort of surprised that nobody's mentioned Ratpoison [sf.net] yet, as it'd have to be the slimmest window manager out there. :)

    Here's a snippet of info from top(1) after I tried running a few of the "lightweight" window managers mentioned here (btw, thanks to whoever mentioned fluxbox, looks good):

    PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE S %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
    26154 pete 10 0 3076 3076 1872 S 0.0 0.5 0:01 sawfish
    26009 pete 9 0 1872 1872 1332 S 0.0 0.3 0:00 fluxbox
    26124 pete 11 0 1816 1816 1260 S 0.0 0.3 0:00 icewm
    26059 pete 9 0 1648 1648 1192 S 0.0 0.3 0:00 blackbox
    26094 pete 10 0 1528 1528 1012 S 0.0 0.2 0:01 fvwm2
    20798 pete 9 0 944 944 808 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 ratpoison

    Sorry if that's not terribly readable, but the important figures are SIZE, RSS and SHARE. Note that fvwm2, interestingly enough, appears even slimmer than blackbox (probably partly due to blackbox being written in C++). And, of course, note that ratpoison is significantly slimmer than any of them.

    Of course, you may not be the sort of person that would appreciate ratpoison :) - but if you've used screen(1) and like that, there's a good chance you'll be able to absorb the ratpoison zen.

    If you're the sort of person for whom screen real estate is all-important and you tend to use mainly terminals and a few browser windows, then give it a go - it combines extreme minimalism with useful functionality in a very nice way. No bullshit to get in your way.

    Plus, it's the only WM I've ever used that I haven't had to configure at all before being productive with it... of course, that could be partly because there's very little about it to configure... :-)

    Pete.

  • ...is muLinux. It's small. It's simple. It fits on a single floppy disk. In fact, there's nothing even to install, it can be run entirely in RAMdisks. The base install includes such wonderments as vim (elvis), built in networking, and even fortune.

    And it has quite a lot of extra packages (for subsequent floppy disks), such as gcc, emacs, or even X11.

    But when it comes to be stripped down, you can't be more stripped than 1.44mb. (Actually, it's a 1.7mb superformat, but who's counting.)

    You can check it out here [sunsite.dk]. For those who want to get to know the command line before installing Linux, it's something to consider.

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