Re: Debian on Slow laptops. What setup is best?
On Wed, 22 Jun 2005 13:01:31 +0200
Benedek Frank <linux@celifornia.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday 22 June 2005 11:36, you wrote:
> > On Wed, 22 Jun 2005, Benedek Frank wrote:
> > > Hi. Can you check to see if I use something really that I shouldnt use at
> > > all?
[...]
>
> 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).
>
The volume keys on my laptop just produce regular key presses (depends on
whether they are acpi buttons or not), sonypi doesn't find anything on this
machine. What I did was to find the key-press symcodes using xev and then I
setup Xmodmap to map them to keysyms which I later map in the fvwm setup file
to use amixer and xosd to show the output
I have in ~/.Xmodmap:
keycode 223 = XF86Standby
keycode 160 = XF86AudioMute
keycode 176 = XF86AudioRaiseVolume
keycode 174 = XF86AudioLowerVolume
And in my fvwm file (a bit complicated but not that much)
Key XF86AudioRaiseVolume A A Exec killall -9 osd_cat; amixer
set PCM 100 unmute ; /usr/bin/amixer set Master 5%+ unmute | sed -n "s/Front
\(Left\|Right\): Playback .* \[\(.*\)\] \[.*\]/\1 \2/p" | osd_cat -d 2 -p
middle -A center -l2 -i -30 -s 2 -S darkgreen -f "-*-arial-bold-r-*-*-80-*-*-*-
*-*-*-*" -c lightgreen
Key XF86AudioLowerVolume A A Exec killall -9 osd_cat; amixer set PCM 100
unmute ; /usr/bin/amixer set Master 5%- unmute | sed -n "s/Front \(Left\|Right
\): Playback .* \[\(.*\)\] \[.*\]/\1 \2/ p" | osd_cat -d 2 -p middle -A center -
l2 -i -30 -s 2 -S darkgreen -f "-*- arial- bold-r-*-*-80-*-*-*-*-*-*-*" -c
lightgreen
Key XF86AudioMute A A Exec killall -9 osd_cat; amixer set PCM 100 unmute ; if
(amixer set Master toggle | grep -q '\[on\]'); then echo Un- Mute; else echo
Mute; fi | osd_cat -d 2 -p middle -A center -l1 -s 2 -S gray10 - f "-*-arial-
bold-r-*- *-100- *-*-*-*-*-*-*" -c lightgreen
Key XF86Standby A A Exec /usr/bin/eject
> >
> > Use xterm instead of gnome-terminal:
> >
> > 1410 tconnors 15 0 4060 4060 2192 S 0.0 0.4 0:44 xterm
> >
> > Yes, a terminal emulator doesn't *need* 30m just to freaking run. Yikes!
> Good call, I will look into getting a smaller terminal.
I use rxvt-unicode-lite since I want unicode but without the bells and wisles
of the full compile. In my case I just use screen embeded in the terminal for
multiple instances since the fvwm tabs extention was too heavy for me (it uses
perl) and I didn't want to use kterm or gnome-whatever. Another option if you
want several terminal windows and not just instances is to run the rxvt server
on startup and then just startup clients, reduces the memory considerably for
multiple terminals.
> >
> > As much as I hate pine (I'd hate kmail worse), it only needs:
> > 5065 tconnors 15 0 3736 3736 2272 S 0.2 0.4 0:00 pine
> >
> > All those other k* programs are just useless helper apps to kde. Blow kde
> > away, and that'll free up a bit.
>
> I have realized that. Actually, having the machine rebootet, with KDM and KDE
> taken out of auto-start, I got a much prettier picture, and a responsive
> system. ALready half-success. When I dont start this kmail prog, I have 140MB
> free mem. Yes, more than half of what I have. Firefox eats up 20 or so. I
> still have 120 left. At that point, I start Kmail, and slowly, about one
> minute it starts, and I will have 20 MB left. So it eats 100MB or RAM. That
> is weird. One weird program. It starts all these programs with it
>
> kmail 30MB
> knotify 14MB
> kded 11MB
> kio_pop3 (as many times as many POP3 accounts I have-each uses 10MB)
> klauncher 10MB
> kdeinit 9.5MB
>
> This is unacceptable. I am looking for a NEW email client. I like a GUI email
> client, that has features such as putting emails to the folders I want them
> to go (filtering) and has support for more than one POP account. Any takers
> on this? Will pine do this for me? Can it use the maildir format?
I am using sylpheed-claws-gtk2 since I want the RTL support for hebrew (gtk has
unicode support properly built in). It has a few quirks but was the best I
found for my tastes. If you don't need RTL sylpheed-claws seems more stable and
faster and has better support for maildir (actually sylpheed-claws-gtk2 doesn't
have any support for maildir but depending on version mismatches it sometimes
works with the sylpheed-claws maildir pluging).
If you are happy with the console mutt is great (the only two reasons I left it
is that it didn't have a folder view to see how many emails are in each folder
and switching to a specific folder can be a bit cumbersome, on the other hand
it is very good at switching to the next folder with unread mail. The other
reason is hebrew support, but that depends on the terminal or reader)
> >
> >
> > Seriously, get rid of the kde and gnome crap. You don't need it. It
> > won't make your life any happier. And then you will look at the dribbling
> > fools who keep on drooling over the eye-candy, and laugh at their constant
> > need to upgrade to the latest hardware that only makes their room hotter
> > (and fucks up the environment for the rest of us). And you won't need to
> > upgrade your computer, because when it is not running crufty bloated
> > crapware, it's plenty fast enough.
> >
> How can I get rid of KDE and Gnome? apt-get uninstall kde gnome ??
>
Don't run KDE and GNOME programs. Note the clean gtk2 programs are ok, they
don't bring in all the crap only gnome programs that depend on the gnome
libraries (you can see from the dependencies).
>
> > Oh, and encourage your favourite hacker to emphasise code quality and
> > optimisation before useless feaping creaturism.
>
Other points that the OP mensioned:
Its a bit tricky to setup, but if you like nice gui login but want something
lighter then kdm you can use qingy (qingy.sf.net) which uses the frame buffer.
I'm afraid that there is no debian package though.
Personally I use wdm at the moment, when I have some time I am planning to
setup qingy.
As a window manager I use fvwm, but its a taste issue. Its a bit harder to
setup but is very flexible.
For text I use lyx to produce latex documents, but I write math so office suits
are mostly irrelevant anyway (and tex is what all journals in my field take
anyway, some will also accept word, but they are a few a far between (thank
god ;-) ).
For a browser I settled on opera which is fast, light and a but more complient
with IE only sites then mozilla. The three main downsides with it are that it
not free (you either accept an advertisement bar or you pay to get a serial),
it doesn't change proxy server setups on the fly for some reason, and it
uses the mozilla plugin for loading pdf files which has a memory leak, reaches
over a Gig on occasion, on the other hand it has an options to load previous
session on startup so you can just close/kill it and reopen to solve the
problem. It also has a debian package (on their site, not the repository) so
its easy to install.
For the record, my machine comes up with a bit
under 30M ram usage running wdm, X, rxvt terminal with a screen session running
in it.
>
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