Setting up a low resource graphical environment (was: Re: GUI)

[Rogério Brito <rbrito@ime.usp.br>]

On Dec 21 2004, Mateusz Loskot wrote:
> 20.12 2004 r., on 09:33 Mike wrote:
> > Fluxbox,  google it and there should be plenty of info
> 
> Right, I also recommend fluxbox.

Let me also add my voice to the choir regarding fluxbox. It's the window
manager that I've been using for a long time.

I used to use Window Maker, but since the dock applications were there
wasting precious space when I was typing something on a low resolution
display or browsing the web, I tried to find something that still allowed
me to use some of the dock applications that I liked (like wmifs, wmmixer
and wmmon) and that allowed them to be hidden when I didn't want them in
the way.

Fluxbox was the answer for those problems and, just as an extra feature, it
uses low resources by today's standards.

It also has some nice features like the ability of putting many windows
"merged" into one window, with the title bar divided with the titles of all
the windows merged. A good space saver (and also a good way of organizing
the space that I have).

I would also recommend the use of rxvt or, perhaps, rxvt-unicode, but I
still haven't got rxvt-unicode to work the way I want.

Besides being able to display Unicode, rxvt-unicode has one nice feature
for saving memory: it can run as a daemon and, whenever you need another
window, you call a client that requests a new window that is managed by the
daemon. It seems to work well.

It is available in 3 versions, rxvt-unicode-lite, rxvt-unicode and
rxvt-unicode-ml, the latter having many things compiled in. I would like to
use rxvt-unicode-lite, but it seems that it doesn't have a scrollbar (like
rxvt-unicode has). This is too much of a limitation, for my purposes.

If you were *really* tight on memory, you could try using xvt.

> I used it on similar machine P166 MHz with 64 MB RAM.  It also run
> Firefox or Epiphany or Dillo as a web browser, mutt was my email client

Mutt is my e-mail client. In fact, it would be my e-mail client even if I
had the fastest of the machines, with plenty of RAM. Mutt is incredibly
flexible and I have not tried many of the graphical MUAs, but those that I
tried left me wondering if there would be a "Graphical Mutt" sometime in
the future (well, perhaps there is already one, but I don't know).

BTW, the fastest computer to which I have access is a Duron 600MHz with
256MB of RAM and I can't use applications too big, if I want to be
productive. :-(

Regarding browsers, I think that Firefox may be a bit slow on a machine
with about 64MB of RAM, but if it is acceptable or not depends on
subjective factors.

> and gnumeric/abiword/LyX was my office apps.

Gnumeric is indeed quite a good spreadsheet. For text-processing, I use
Emacs (with AUCTeX) and teTeX, since I need a lot of mathematics for my
work.


Cheers, Rogério Brito

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