Lightweight Linux That's Both Beautiful *and* Functional

My expectation from the title was that the writer would do a survey of a few of the current lightweight WMs. Instead he went straight from KDE to XFCE to FVWM-Crystal. He explained his choices, but still, the article was limited.

Seriously, Ubuntu? There could have also been a discussion of other distributions.

If you want to make an old machine work, you have to either sacrifice looks or time. Etch with xfce and a different set of icons looks really good on my main production machine with a 2 ghz processor and 512 mb of ram. It sure looks a lot better than fvwm-crystal. I obviously could run anything I want.

Sorry, but if this was designed to be informative for Windows converts, I think it missed the mark. All you'll hear is laughter if you introduce fvwm.

Geez! If a 2GHz processor is 'old', I'm using ancient technology. Y'all should see my 450MHz boxes run Debian with GNOME and KDE!

> If a 2GHz processor is 'old', I'm using ancient technology.

Agreed. That is ancient. I won't claim 2 GHz is old, just that it can run anything yet I choose xfce.

My primary server and my laptop are both @ 1.2GHz. That's as cutting edge as I can get right now. :-(

I guess in that case there is no threat that you will give up on Linux and move to Vista.

If you don't run the full load of junk that's included with the kde default, kde is just as fast as any of the supposed lightweights. I suspect the same is, more or less, true for gnome. I have a PII dual 300 with 512mb that I'll be converting from w2k soon. I know that's going to work with kde just fine.

> I guess in that case there is no threat that you will give up on Linux and move to Vista.

You know, If MS paid off my mortgage, I would probably buy a fancy-shmancy new Vista box to have handy for all my DRMed content. Oh wait, I don't have DRMed content. Well, I could probably use it as a door stop or something.

> Well, I could probably use it as a door stop or something.

Sure, mount it on the house peak as a weathervane... nice finishing touch :)

Um, Jim, I live in a sub-division. They have standards for decorating the house. I'm pretty sure Vista's UI violates the standards. But it might make a nice scare crow in my veggie garden. ;-)

> a nice scare crow in my veggie garden. ;-)

Vista sure as heck scares me. Crows are pretty smart, so, it will probably scare them too, but i'f not, just paste a picture of Bill on it ;-)

If you need a Celeron 900 with 256 Mb RAM, I'd call KDE a resource hog :-) I still have an old PIII 600 with 128 Mb RAM lying around and it runs Ubuntu 5.10 just fine. And that's one of the heavier distro's! 6.06 and after start to lag though.

Your PIII 600 trumps my Celeron 900 my friend...it's faster.

Your L2 cache is bigger (512 vs. my 128) and you have MMX and SSE instruction sets which my Celeron doesn't have. Also, my RAM runs at PC100 speed which is the same as my FSB...100MHz...I use the PC133 because they have better latency than any sticks of PC100 I have. Your PIII runs at 133Mhz FSB.

http://balusc.xs4all.nl/srv/har-cpu-int-p3.php

So what is a resource hog again? I'd say that Ubuntu 5.10 is if you need all that power of the PIII 600 :D

Try my PII/450MHz running Etch/KDE/OOo - at blazing speeds. :-p

BTW, devnet, I was j/k. ;-)

DCParris,

I had a PII 350 running SimplyMEPIS but it died :(

My condolences. I have a PII-350 that's been somewhat cannibalized. Probably still works though.

/me hugs his PII-300 Dual :D

quote:: It leads people to think that a PIII with 256MB of RAM can't run KDE and that simply isn't true. I've had a Celeron 900 with 256MB of PC133 humming with PCLinuxOS MiniME for quite some time. ::quote

I have Mandriva 2007 with KDE running on a P3 500 with 196 Meg of RAM, so there.

I have two P-III 700 and 800mhz machines running KDE, and well I might add.

I did keep an eye out during the install to keep it as lean as possible but it is still a very full featured desktop.

Quoting:Your PIII 600 trumps my Celeron 900 my friend...it's faster.

Okay, beat this: When I moved out there was a gap of about two weeks untill my new PC was ready (the AMD64 I now use). In those two weeks I used Ubuntu 5.10 on a PII 233 Mhz with 128 Mb RAM. The boot was slow, you didn't want to open any of the OpenOffice packages, but aside from that it did work reasonably well (for two weeks anyway) :-)

I have had Linspire running on a P2 350 with 256 Meg of ram, and used OO.o.

I installed Xandros on my TI-83!

> I installed Xandros on my TI-83!

Shhhee... No fair resorting to MS tactics there devnet ;-)

I can run just about anything on an old PII-233 Micron Laptop with 96 Megs of RAM...from KDE distros to XP (for marine chartplotting software).

I have a P-I 233 ThinkPad with 32 Megs RAM that runs DSL or Fluxbuntu just fine. Sure, it isn't your power desktop, but it's entirely adequate for correspondence, web development/browsing and network monitoring. It's responsive, something you can't say about the Win98 that was stock on the machine.

It's funny that those old machines sometimes run better than newer ones...as long as you install to the hard drive. Running live CD's is like watching trees grow.

I know someone who uses a reasonably aged machine (with big RAM upgrade) to run LiveCD distro's. That's all she ever does really. She gave MS the boot but is afraid to install a distro to her HDD. She just downloads the latest build LiveCD occasionally and uses it as her OS. The HDD is used to store her personal files. She claims it's great because she doesn't have to be afraid of hackers and virusses. After a reboot the system is clean anyway!

Yes, she gets the concept of LiveCD but not the concept of "There are no Linux virusses".

Ok, Tuxtom beat my 350MHz K5 with 128MB RAM, so that's out. Anyway, I tend to use it only as a backup, and run the KDE apps on OLWM just because.

The thing I really like is that, even with a machine 9 years old, it still runs the up-to-date software. Latest kernel, latest OpenOffice, Mozilla, Konqueror, Kmail, etc. I wonder what Vista would do on that machine? Would it even _boot_ without a DVD drive?

See if MS will send you the installation floppies. :-D

Preferably 5"1/4 SD :-)

:-D

> Preferably 5"1/4 SD :-)

Oh come on now, even my PII dual has a 3 1/2" and a CDRW.