Re: Debian on Slow laptops. What setup is best?
Hi everybody!
On Wednesday 22 June 2005 13:42, Koen Vermeer wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-06-22 at 13:01 +0200, Benedek Frank wrote:
> > I have realized that. I blew it away already. I will set up Sonypid which
> > can enable Volume controlls to speial keys, so I dont need kmix anymore.
> > (I guess this is how a newbie learns).
>
> Try installing xfce4-mixer, which, judging by the name, seems to be the
> xfce-equivalent of kmix.
>
> You could also use xdm instead of kdm. Try sylpheed instead of kmail.
>
> Note that I don't use any of the suggested programs. I just looked for
> xfce/lightweight programs that do approximately the same thing.
I have used xfce in the past and didn't like it a lot. For a no-frills but
still nice graphical environment, I'd recommend you use icewm (included in
Sarge) with xdm as a display manager. I am using that combination on one of
my computers, a Pentium II 350 MHz with 64 (yes, 64) MB RAM, and it works
quite well.
As a terminal emulator, I recommend xterm. For the kind of machine you have,
I'd forget about the KDE/Gnome alternatives.
You could also want to try alsamixer, the ALSA mixer app (included in the
alsa-utils package if i'm not wrong). It is a pseudo-GUI text-based app, very
functional and nice (you also have a GUI interface, but it doesn't add much
and I don't use it).
For e-mail, I use Sylpheed, again with very good looks and performance, and
again available as a Debian package. For the web, the best choice I can think
of for a low-end computer is Opera (www.opera.com), which is small, very fast
and very pleasant to use. Or you could use a text-only browser such as lynx
or w3m.
Since I don't use that machine for Office work, I can't tell you which office
suite will work best. In my experience, OpenOffice is horribly slow to start
in any computer, but performs quite decently afterwards; I don't know about
other suites though.
Depending on what do you need, you might want to try
LaTeX instead of a WYSIWYG program; for me it works.
> > How can I get rid of KDE and Gnome? apt-get uninstall kde gnome ??
>
> I'd be a bit more cautious, because you might end up removing apps that
> you still like to use, even if occasionally. You'll have to know what
> packages are depending on either gnome or kde. I'm using aptitude, so
> I'd start aptitude, remove gnome/kde and look what packages aptitude
> wants to remove because of missing dependencies. Try to find
> lightweight/XFCE alternatives for those packages, and then remove the
> corresponding kde/gnome apps.
If it is of any help, I never found a KDE/GNOME application I couldn't
substitute for a lightweight one. But I agree that you should look closely at
the dependencies in order to avoid surprises...
Oh, and after removing a large number of apps you should use deborphan to
find stale libraries that are no longer needed and only take up disk space.
Now that's a program I like ;-).
Hope this helps!
- Urtzi -
--
Urtzi Jauregi
Fakulteta za Matematiko in Fiziko, Univerza v Ljubljani
Jadranska 19, Si-1000 Ljubljana
Slovenija
Tel: ++386 01 540 13 53
e-mail: urtzi@fmf.uni-lj.si
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