Results tagged “Fluxbox” from CLICK

I decided to start adding apps to the Self-Reliant Thin Client, which is running Debian Etch from an 8GB CF card as the boot drive with a 1 GHz VIA CPU that insists at running at 500 MHz, plus 256 MB of RAM.

I used aptitude to add the Geany text editor and the Fluxbox window manager.

Fluxbox runs great, as usual, but I really don't see any app-speed improvement with Iceweasel, OpenOffice, Geany or Gedit.

In previous tests, I saw a real advantage to using Fluxbox or Xfce over GNOME, but here in Debian, GNOME is running well enough that I'll probably use it quite a bit. I'll continue testing Fluxbox, but I imagine that GNOME will continue to be my main window manager on this box (as it has been when running off of a traditional hard drive).

It definitely depends on the specific box, and especially on the available RAM. I guess that 256 MB of RAM is enough for good GNOME performance. With 128 MB of RAM, Xfce, Fluxbox, Fvwm or other lightweight window managers might dramatically improve performance vs. GNOME.

One thing I have to do is run top when running the same apps in both GNOME and Fluxbox. If the same amount of swap, relatively speaking, is being used in both window managers, that tells me why my GNOME performance is so relatively good. But if there was a lot more swap used in GNOME vs. Fluxbox, then I'd know that the lighter-weight window managers are really making a difference.

I've been meaning to do a Debian Lenny install so I can see how X behaves in a fresh installation vs. my much-older Debian partition that began life as Etch and has seen many, many packages come and go.

First things first: The Desktop installation of Lenny will not fit in 3 GB. At least the download-and-install software portion wouldn't work in that amount of space when I selected Desktop during the "task select" portion of the Lenny install.

I didn't want to make my root partition any bigger than 3 GB, so I elected to do a Standard installation, which doesn't include X or a desktop environment, although I did notice a few X11-related packages sneaking in.

After the install, I used aptitude to add X, Fluxbox and a few apps.

I started with:

aptitude install xorg fluxbox

With that line, I don't think I would've needed to add xserver-xorg, which I believe is wholly contained in the xorg megapackage. (I'll have to check this out).

I added a few items to get me going:

aptitude install iceweasel ted geany

Since then (it's been 10 or so hours), I've removed X and Fluxbox, replaced X and brought in Xfce with:

# aptitude install xfce-desktop

I had plenty of space for that.

I've also pretty much found out that my problem with "ghosting" on the screen in X continues in this new installation. It's specific to Lenny; I haven't seen it in Etch or any other Linux distro. Sometimes running xrefresh in a terminal clears things up, usually not. I can't figure out what's going on (I'm no PC video or Xorg expert), and everything I've tried hasn't worked.

I need to keep Googling until I find someone with the same problem who's smarter than I am. Shouldn't take long, I hope.

I know I said in a previous entry that Debian's Xfce installation didn't exactly provide what I wanted, but looking at what I need, Debian rises to the top of the pack.

Top of my list: Installing Debian with encrypted LVM. Especially in a laptop, encryption is a must to secure your data from prying eyes, should the laptop be lost or stolen.

And any little utility that Wolvix has can probably be added in Debian. And Aptitude is very good. It's not graphical, but it represents the best of Debian.

And I still trust the security team for Debian more than I do most others — this despite the OpenSSL problem that has recently plagued every Debian-based distro in recent weeks. (At least somebody figured it out, and the whole incident should tighten up things considerably in the Debian Project).

And in Debian, I can easily install all of our little girl's educational programs, although she is fairly vocal about preferring to use the newer, faster $0 Laptop, a 1.3GHz Celeron-based Gateway laptop with 1GB of RAM.

The only "stopper" is Google's lack of willingness to easily let users install Google Gears in Mozilla-derived browsers not named Firefox. That means it's a pain in the ass to install Gears with Iceweasel, the Debian-derived, noncopyrighted equivalent to Firefox.

And I haven't tried Debian on the Compaq Armada 7770dmt since I boosted the RAM from 64MB to 144MB. Responsiveness in X could be a lot better with such a relative overabundance of RAM.

So as far as the Compaq goes, I'm down to running Debian or Wolvix on the hard drive and Puppy as a live CD. Like I said previously, I don't want to kill out OpenBSD just yet, so I'll need either a second hard drive or a 4GB Compact Flash card with CF-to-IDE laptop adapter (the latter available for a quite-reasonable $10 at LogicSupply.com). I might even spring for a second hard-drive caddy for the Compaq, should I be able to find one, to make swapping the drives that much easier.

Or I could bite the bullet, get rid of OpenBSD for the time being, try out Debian and Wolvix on the hard drive, and narrow things down. I'll continue to run Puppy, with a separate partition for its encrypted pup_save file.

I've taken to using the Leafpad text editor in Puppy (I'm using it now), and the Leafpad-derived Mousepad editor in Xfce is just as fast, if spartan. Xfce's Terminal app has similar attributes. And I have no problem running xterm or rxvt.

It's really about the text editors and browsers I use, the software my daughter likes to run, stability, security, encryption and ease of maintenance.

Moreover, it's about speed on old hardware. These things look very different on newer computers. My 2002-era Gateway laptop runs Ubuntu very well. I doubt I could even boot Ubuntu on this Compaq. Even the Xubuntu live CD won't boot. With Debian, I have no problem.

On the Gateway, Ubuntu's polish as compared to Debian makes Ubuntu a better choice. But on this older Compaq, Debian's flexibility and added speed (don't ask me why it's faster, it just is) are much needed.

Next moves: I need to get a PCMCIA Ethernet card since I don't have regular access to WiFi. While I'm at it, a PCMCIA card for USB is something I should also look into. Sure, I could transfer files over the network, but USB is ... easier. (Note: Since this post was originally written, I have gotten an Ethernet card for the Compaq).

Previously:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part IV — Wolvix Cub is surprisingly strong
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part V — Where I'm headed
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VI — Younger Puppies

Coming up:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VIII — Final thoughts (aka "Why?")

I booted into Debian Lenny for the first time in a while on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), and after doing about 150 updates, I logged out of the GNOME desktop and switched over to Fluxbox.

Now this PC, for me, anyway, is quite powerful — 1.3 GHz Celeron, 1 GB RAM — so GNOME runs quite well on it.

But with Fluxbox (and even with Xfce, I suspect) it really flies. Apps load way quicker than they do in GNOME, and if you can deal with a more minimalist window manager, you get a lot more in terms of performance.

I had my Alps Touchpad's tap-to-click function turned off in GNOME, but in Fluxbox I had to use GSynaptics to turn it off. I wonder if things will be screwed up in GNOME as a result. The first thing I'll do is see if I can easily turn off the touchpad's tapping for my other users. That doesn't work so well in GNOME, where the "primary" user has control over the touchpad but the others do not.

I logged into one of my other user accounts, turned off tapping in GSynaptics, and everything worked. That's the way it's supposed to be in GNOME.

One thing I'd like to do is modify the Fluxbox menu to make things quicker, with my most-used apps higher up so I don't have to mouse through so many menus to get to them.

It took me a few tries to get a good burn on Damn Small Linux 4.3.

Once I did, it worked great on my Dell Optiplex GX 520. It also performed flawlessly on my VIA C3 test box. It didn't do so well on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), where the colors were totally whacked out (blue looked like orange, etc. ...). But DSL has never run well on the Gateway, so I didn't expect anything.

The biggest "get" in DSL 4.3 is Firefox 2, which for some reason has been renamed Bon Echo for the purposes of this distribution.

Going from Firefox version 1.06 to 2 is a huge deal. Quite a few Web sites require at least FF 1.5 to work at all, including many Web e-mail services and the Movable Type and Blogger interfaces.

And on my 64 MB Compaq laptop, Damn Small Linux is pretty much the only thing that'll run Firefox without continuous swapping and long delays between operations. So having FF 2 is very important to me.

DSL 4.3 did load and run on the Compaq, but for some reason the desktop wallpaper did not appear. I've been running DSL 4.0 on the Compaq, and that does X perfectly, along with the desktop design. I don't know what's wrong with the 4.3 configuration, but it does make the screen look rather gray, also the machine status information unreadable on the upper right side of the screen.

And when I ran Fluxbox instead of JWM, I couldn't figure out how to get the Fluxbox menu to show up. Right-clicking brought up the DFM file manager (which I quite like while using JWM; it made DSL 4.0 a lot easier to use).

If I can manage to bump up the RAM on my Compaq laptop (aka The $15 Laptop) to the maximum of 144 MB, I might be able to comfortably run Firefox/IceWeasel in OpenBSD or Debian. Right now, I can't even run Seamonkey (the Mozilla-based Web suite) in Puppy Linux. Basically I can run the Dillo browser in any OS, but that doesn't allow me to do all the things I need to do on the Web. Only DSL allows me to run Firefox with some measure of comfort in my small amount of RAM.

Aside from the Firefox upgrade, I don't see a lot of major differences in Damn Small Linux, and that's as it should be. DSL has a fairly rapid development pace, and lead developer Robert Shingledecker puts a lot into fixing bugs from release to release.

Even without resolving the desktop-wallpaper issue, DSL 4.3 is a huge leap for any user with only 64 MB of RAM. Fixing this little problem will cement Damn Small Linux as the best distribution for my Compaq Armada 7770dmt.