[GLLUG] new guy to Linux, need a few reccomendations

[Richard Houser]

Chick?  You may well be our expert on this one.  I recall little more
than that some tiny distros like DSL shipped a lighter-weight X
server.

On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 11:52 PM, Bert W. Carrier Jr.
<bertcarrier at gmail.com> wrote:
> Richard,
>
> Those are some excellent points. I am concerned about power draw as
> well.   This machine is one of about 7 or 8 that I have laying around,
> and it is by no means my main computer.  It is nice and light, so it
> would be good for dragging back and forth to school.
>
> What is a good alternative to Xorg X11?
>
>
> On Wed, 2010-01-20 at 23:43 -0500, Richard Houser wrote:
>> IceWM is a light-weight window manager as-is (my personal preference
>> for P3 class machine on a ram diet).  Once you get your gui trimmed
>> down to that point, you should turn off all extraneous services to
>> save ram.  Linux can do usability wonders with 32MB of server daemons,
>> but you want to avoid much of that if you are capped at 192MB.
>>
>> You may also want to swap from Xorg X11 to a lighter-weight
>> alternative.  Also, don't even consider trying OpenOffice without a
>> RAM bump.  Chick may have some recommendations for lighter-weight
>> replacement for some of this, as he tends to run some P2/P3 era
>> laptops.  You may just be better off upgrading the ram.  There's a
>> good chance you have a friend somewhere with 256MB of unused P3 era
>> RAM.
>>
>> If you are going to use this much, my personal recommendation is to
>> invest in a newer machine.  Over the course of a few years, you could
>> easily pay for the cost of a new machine in electricity alone,
>> assuming you spec it out appropriately.  My current (big) server
>> started out as a $200 black Friday build a year ago (4GB ram, AMD X2
>> 4000 65 watt, Antec 85%+ efficiency PS), and you can certainly shop
>> used components in trusted circles, too.  After adding a couple cards
>> and a hard disk, that machine pulls about 605-70 watts from the wall,
>> as opposed to near 250watts from my previous one.  That's well over
>> 100Kwh difference a month if you leave it on, and the new hardware is
>> capable of running multiple operating systems concurrently under KVM
>> (replacing more machines).
>>
>> On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 7:00 PM, Karl Schuttler <rexykik at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Any of the box's would be a good choice for a gui on an older machine
>> > (Fluxbox, Blackbox, Whitebox in particular), but you're talking about window
>> > managers (WM) and not about distros here. You could just install fluxbox on
>> > top of your base ubuntu/IceWM install (apt-get install fluxbox) and try that
>> > out, see if it's any faster.
>> >
>> > On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 6:54 PM, Bert W. Carrier Jr. <bertcarrier at gmail.com>
>> > wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Hello folks,
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> I am new to the group, and I have been using Ubuntu 9.10 for a few
>> >> months now on my main box. I like it quite well, and I rarely boot to XP
>> >> at all anymore. I tried Kubuntu, and did'nt care for it as it was slow
>> >> and crashed often.   I also am running Xubuntu on one of my P4 laptops,
>> >> and it seems ok.
>> >>
>> >> My question is:   I have a P3, 500mhz dinosaur laptop with 192mb RAM,
>> >> and I want to run linux on it for word processing, email, and web
>> >> surfing.   I tried Xubuntu with no success, it's far too slow.  I
>> >> installed the base Ubuntu system from the alternate install CD, and
>> >> installed IceWM, but I didn't care for that.   I don't think I am ready
>> >> to build my own version of a GUI.  What is a good, prepackaged distro
>> >> for a slow old beater?
>> >>
>> >> How about Fluxbox, has anyone tried it?    Sorry if I come off like a
>> >> total noob,  but I guess if the shoe fits, right?
>> >>
>> >> Bert
>> >>
>> >> _______________________________________________
>> >> linux-user mailing list
>> >> linux-user at egr.msu.edu
>> >> http://mailman.egr.msu.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-user
>> >
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > linux-user mailing list
>> > linux-user at egr.msu.edu
>> > http://mailman.egr.msu.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-user
>> >
>> >
>> _______________________________________________
>> linux-user mailing list
>> linux-user at egr.msu.edu
>> http://mailman.egr.msu.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-user
>
>
>