Getting Xubuntu Feisty to bend to my will

I made some progress -- and some discoveries -- today with my Xubuntu 7.04 Feisty installation on the Maxspeed Maxterm thin client.

First of all, can we all agree that the GIMP, in its heaviness, doesn't really fit in with the Xubuntu philosophy of lighter apps for a lighter window manager?

And with this heaviness in mind, today I installed my first Debian package -- mtPaint, which despite having greater capabilities than GNU Paint while being as quick to load, is not available as a Ubuntu package, either in Universe, Multiverse, or any other 'verse. I found it and downloaded it from the Web, then clicked on it to install. I couldn't figure out how to add it to the Applications menu, but I was able with Xfce to create a desktop shortcut.

Incidentally, I did try out GNU Paint, which is a Ubuntu-approved application, and quite nice for what it does, except that it can't resize images, which is the main thing I need an image-editing program to do.

But the result is that I have, indeed, installed a Debian package in Xubuntu, and it couldn't have been easier. I'll look into getting mtPaint into the Graphics menu under Applications -- how hard can it be? But another thing I did learn is that while the GIMP is torturously slow to load, and probably is quite a memory hog on this 256 MB box, once you have it loaded, it's not any slower or faster at actually processing images. I didn't detect any speed boost using mtPaint ... except for the fact that it loads in about 3 seconds ... as opposed to the GIMP's 60 or so seconds.

The other thing I did was add Wine and Internet Explorer 6 in my quest to do work on Dailynews.com in Linux. Wine is about as mysterious to me as it gets, but I did go into the Ubuntu Multiverse (or whatever 'verse it is) and install Wine from the Synaptic Package Manager. As an aside, it's interesting that besides Synaptic, there's the Add/Remove Programs utility, and I almost prefer it to Synaptic at this early stage.

Back to Wine: I installed Wine from Synaptic and then used IES4Linux to get Internet Explorer into the Wine world. I did this successfully once before with Xubuntu when running it as a live CD, so I knew that this worked. I had IE6 on my desktop, and it actually worked. And while I was able to use the Daily News Web-publishing software (which is browser-based and requires IE), that system is so buggy that I really couldn't run it under Wine due to repeated crashes. The problem is more ours than Wine's, but it's disappointing nonetheless. I tried to install some other publishing software under Wine by moving entire directories from my Windows box to the Xubuntu box, but nothing would run. I'll have to delve further into Wine to see exactly what I need to do. It may be a lost cause, but I'm not expecting much. Still, I'm not above giving Codeweavers a try.

That said, it was only with the IES4Linux package that I got Internet Explorer at all. I wish I didn't have to use it at all, because sticking with Linux-specific browsers and not dealing with Wine at all is a whole lot easier than the alternative.

And what about the 256 MB memory ceiling of this thin client? Some commenters said that it's not an enviable position, to be with this little memory. All I can say at this point is that while there's been quite a bit of use of the swap partition on the hard drive, the system hasn't gone down once, even with all the stress I'm putting on it.