Hi! > I'm creating a meta package for install a lite desktop for old > machines with poor hardware.
Hey, that's a really cool idea! Debian is one of the last modern (and not specialised) Linux distribution feasible for old and slow hardware, especially old PCs. But Sarge already made a big step away from old PCs (e.g. by dropping XFree86 3.3 and requiring 32 Megs of RAM for installation -- Woody needed only 12 Megs) so I'm really happy to see that others try to take the cudgels for Debian on old hardware too. I used the Slackware and kernel 2.2 based Desktop Light (DeLi) Linux (http://www.delilinux.de/) distribution for a while on old boxes (e.g. i486 laptops), but its package variety just sucks (the full ISO is 90 MB) and so I had to compile a lot on the boxes itself locally. (Any Gentoo advocates here? ;-) But the package list of DeLi Linux partly was quite well chosen (Siag Office as office tools, Dillo and Links as browsers, etc.) and DeLi can surely give an idea of what is good for old, low resource hardware and what isn't. (Ok, I strongly disagree in putting PHP5 on such boxes, even only for developing purposes. ;-) Since one of the points, why I like Debian, is its huge package variety (so there's nearly always also a low end software for the desired purpose) and since Woody runs fine on most of those boxes, I was perfectly fine with that. Now since Woody runs out of security support, I installed Sarge on a Pentium 90 with 76 MB of RAM and a 1,5 GB big but bad performing HD. I general it runs fine, but X took a while (the graphics card is no more supported in XFree 4.x and there no more supported in Sarge) to get it running. That is also one of the reasons I stay with Woody as long as I can. Another reason is GNOME 2.x. It is neither as performant as GNOME 1.x nor is it (IMHO) as user-friendly as GNOME 1.x was. (Ok, we'll drop the user-friendly discussion here, it just doesn't matter here. ;-) > I would like to receive opinions about my packages list: > > - x-window-system-core > - xfce4 (beautiful!) That's really fine IMHO. XFCE is not as resource-hungry as GNOME or KDE are and is easy to use. But if you just want an easy to use WM instead of a desktop environment, I suggest the FLTK based FLWM or one of the *box famliy window managers (and ion3 or ratpoison for the mouse-haters). > - gdm Why gdm and not wdm? gdm depends on a horribly large bunch of libraries including GNOME. wdm depends on way less libraries, looks not as bare as xdm by default does and still is fast and easy to use. (We use it on all our Debian workstations at the Department of Physics at ETH Zurich.) > - mozilla-firefox > - mozilla-thunderbird Those are resource-whores, too: They render their whole GUI with Gecko instead of a widget toolkit and cost a lot of performance and memory. You just don't want them on old hardware, it's really no fun to use them there. If you want a slim Gecko based web browser use Galeon, Epiphany (both GNOME, but still faster than Firefox or Mozilla itself) or the currently GTK based (and AFAIH planned to be FLTK based) Kazehakase -- a web browser useable for both beginners and power users (the UI and the configuration dialog has a user level switch). Only drawback: Kazehakase isn't really stable in Sarge. But it is in Sid (or at least was the last time I played with it). And then there are the real low end browsers like Dillo and the Links family (links, links2, elinks, etc.) as well the pure text browsers as lynx and w3m. But there you have to lower your sights regarding the rendering quality respective rendering features (no CSS there, etc.). > - eog Isn't xzgv much leaner? > - abiword > - gnumeric Here I would like to see Siag Office, the free low end office package instead. But unfortunately it fell out of Debian with Sarge. It run acceptable even on a i486 with 16 Megs of RAM. In general I would try to not use any GNOME or KDE depended package (and I don't say that because I like parts of Linus' statement in the Desktop Environment War a few months ago ;-), GNOME and KDE are both just a lot of bloat which badly slows down old boxes. In the future, I see thre main problems for Debian on old PCs and other old non-x86 hardware: + Memory requirements for installation (32 MB RAM AFAIK). The requirements for finally running a Sarge box are lower AFAIH. + The dropping of XFree86 3.3 as far as Xorg doesn't step in. XFree86 4.x probably never will. + The dropping of the 2.4 kernel line: This will drop AFAIK support for e.g. active ISDN cards. On the other hand the new schedulers seem to bring better (feelable) performance, if an old box is used as desktop. I'm not sure, if it really is a possibility to still support older hardware in Debian, but if the Linux kernel 2.6 makes hassles, perhaps Debian GNU/kFreeBSD can help. I at least plan to give it a try on some Pentium 1 box. In general, I think it could help to create some kind of "forward ports" (e.g. packages from Woody ported to Sarge or Etch), especially for hardware support of old hardware and of some fallen out low resource applications like e.g. the above mentioned Siag Office. I don't think that security support is a main goal in this usage area. P.S.: Had Sid running well on a Pentium 1, 90 MHz, 64 MB RAM and IIRC 5 GB IDE HD. Used it to test Kazehakase from Sid and it felt faster than Galeon 1.3 (GNOME 2) from Sarge on a 500 MHz and 256 MB RAM box and about as fast as Galeon 1.2 (GOME 1.4) from Woody on a 400 MHz and 578 MB RAM box. P.P.S.: Writing this mail from an ten years old IBM ThinkPad with Pentium 1, 133 MHz, 48 MB RAM and 1 GB HD running Woody and XFree 3.3.6. Oh, and did I already say "Jehova"? ;-) Kind regards, Axel (aka XTaran) -- /~\ | Axel Beckert \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign | [EMAIL PROTECTED] X Say No to HTML in EMail and News | [EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ | http://abe.home.pages.de/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
