[TriLUG] OT: hardware question

[Mike Johnson]

Chris Hedemark [chris at yonderway.com] wrote:
 
> On the flip side you can select applications that may not be as feature rich
> but will effectively act like a CPU upgrade on the machine.  For example,
> instead of running KDE or Gnome, try Window Maker or icewm.  Instead of
> running Evolution try pine.  As for Mozilla, well, to be honest I haven't
> found a web browser yet on Unix that I like.  The feature rich browsers tend
> to be fat and slow, and crash often.  The lightweight browsers tend to have
> trouble rendering many popular sites.  You may be stuck with bloatware on
> the browser front.

I've got to chime in with a big endorsement for icewm.  Over the weekend,
I re-installed OpenBSD (3.0) on one of my Sparc5 110's.  It only has
64MB of ram, but with icewm, the thing was -quite- useable.  X was snappy
and, even with only 256 colors, the default theme was quite nice.  icewm
is using less than one (1) MB of RAM.  In fact, the xterms are using
more memory than icewm!  By the way, the whole system is only using
32MB of RAM, complete with several xterms open.

For a browser on this box, I use links (text based like lynx, but it 
supports frames and tables) in an xterm.  You might look at Opera.
I used it on a laptop that only had 64MB of RAM, and along with 
blackbox (I'd run icewm on it, if I had it to do again), the whole
system was very usable.

> So much attention is paid towards scaling Linux up onto bigger and better
> hardware.  IMHO more attention needs to be paid to scaling down as well.  If
> Linux is to "take over the world" it needs to run on machines that the rest
> of the world runs.  Remember, outside of the few highly developed nations,
> computers are a very rare and expensive commodity.   Our public schools are
> literally throwing out machines that these people would have to pay a few
> months wages for.

It depends on your distribution, I think.  All of the main distributions
are moving towards more and more features, because that's what's
expected in the regular world.  Us geeks that are annoyed at the
bloat can roll our own, or just not install kde and gnome.

In the end, this bloat is one of the reasons I got into and -love-
OpenBSD.  It was so refreshing to know everything that is installed
on my system.

Mike
-- 
"Let the power of Ponch compel you!  Let the power of Ponch compel you!"
   -- Zorak on Space Ghost

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