Suggestions on Distributions

[Damien Elmes]

Brett Worth <brettw at cray.com.au> writes:

> On Tue, 19 Mar 2002, Bolin, Robert wrote:
>
>> Can anyone make suggestions?
>
> For a window manager I've found "window maker" to be pretty light 
> weight.  I'm not sure if its heavier or lighter than fvwm but it 
> certainly is fast.

A pentium 200 w/ 64MB of ram can be quite comfortable if you ditch all the
extras that are loaded on a default desktop of any of the major distributions.
Nautilus is the most obvious one to turn off, but all the unused applets in the
panel can be turned off too (I don't use the panel on some of my computers, and
on the computer I do, it serves only to display a mail check applet)

As for window manager, I'm willing to take a small performance hit if it means
I can run sawfish. I've become terribly addicted to the idea of a scriptable
window manager, and don't think I could go back.

I seem to recall someone mentioning that it took an xterm about a second to
start up. One way I've found to curb that problem (and it's mighty convenient
even without this speed boon), is to use a program like multi-gnome-terminal,
or screen. I've got a key bound in sawfish to start a multi-gnome-terminal
session, and then I can hit the key again to jump to a terminal, and again when
it's focused in order to open a new tab up - which, because it doesn't have to
start an entire new application to serve a new terminal, is an order of
magnitude faster.

Combine that with zsh to set the name of the tab based on the application which
is running, and it's a pretty nifty setup.

If a GTK dependency doesn't inspire you, a similar setup is easy to construct
with the program "screen" (infact, that's what I used to use).

But I digress..

-- 
Damien Elmes
resolve at repose.cx