On Thursday 25 August 2005 10:07 am, Richards Jr, Edward C. wrote: > I have installed Debian 3.1 on my old Compaq Presario 1825 laptop, Pentium > II, Celeron 366, 192 meg ram, ATI Rage 3D, 30 gig hd, DVD-ROM, 15" LCD, > etc. Everything is working fine [ except the USB mouse] ...
Cool. I've had good luck with Sarge and Mepis on low resource hardware, mostly by running low resource window managers like fluxbox, enlightenment, window maker and xfce4. What's surprising is not how much is too slow to bear but how much works and how well. Low resource does not mean low feature. Many parts of the "heavier" KDE and Gnome work very well outside of their native environments. Kicker, kmail, konqueror and other applications get along well with other environments. There are many window maker dock apps, like wmCalClock, wmMoonClock and wmibam (a battery monitor) that are cool anywere. Eterm, with it's easy to use transparancy, is a joy for cli users that almost makes up for KDE's transparency not working under Enlightenment. > I am using gdm > and it found all of the window managers except for Enlightenment. I had this problem with kdm and found the solution here: http://lists.debian.org/debian-qt-kde/2005/05/msg00143.html If you don't find the answer, just apt-get kdm. > I want to run a light weight window manager, but have it be as > "Window$ Refugee friendly" as possible. I have used fvwm on Puppy Linux and > FluxBox (I think) on DSL and Feather Linux. In all cases there was a "user > menu" that could be accessed either from the kikker or via a desktop click, > or apps could be launched via desktop icons. I ran the setup script from > within fvwm and it picked up portions of the KDG and Gnome menus, but some > selections from the menu's don't work. I haven't been able to get/find any > user menus on the other window! managers, nor have I discovered how to > create desktop shortcuts in the other WM's. I've done a fair amount of > Googling but haven't found solutions yet. Can anyone point me in the > direction of some HOWTO's on configuring any of these desktop environments? So many wants! For windows refugee friendly, just run kicker under any window manager. Enlightenment and Windowmaker are exceptionally fast and good window managers and both work well with kicker. In fact, you can run multiple kickers X forwarded from many machines is you place them in different places so that they don't run into each other on redraw. With E and WM you can stick them to a particular desktop by holding the alt key and left clicking on them. The short cuts you seek are in many window manager's menus labeled "Window Managers" Be sure to have installed the menu edit tools and preference editors, neither Enlightenment and Window Maker packages depend on them, and indeed you can leave menu editing up to Debian and be happier for it. Configuring the menus outside of KDE has never given me good results. Debian does a good job of managing system menus with the "all applications" and most packages put something there. Because kicker works so well and everywhere, I turn to it when I need a menu. Most of the time I use a command line or a child dock for frequently started applications. Looking through GUI menus, even when presented a consistent Debian menu everywhere, is a pain in the neck. A koffice and open office submenu, and a kde calculator entry were usefull additions to KDE's "office" menu. I'm not sure what fvwm's scripts do, but what you said does not sound good. > Recommendations on the various window managers would be greatly appreciated > as well. You've hit all the good ones, so I'm not sure what to say. Enlightenment, as you have seen, is my favorite on low resource laptops. I've even made it run on my oldest with a mere 24 MB of RAM. Window Maker, KDE and Gnome applications all run well under Enlightenment, as they do under Window Maker. Running the Kicker helps many of KDE's goodis, such as your calendar reminder, kmix and noautum. > My goal here is three fold. I want to use OpenOffice 2 Beta on > this machine, I want the machine to respond fairly crisply, and I want to > learn some more about what goes on "under the hood" of the OS. I can > accomplish the first goal with my Linux distro of choice, but the current > incarnations of KDE and Gnome are just too resource intensive for this > laptop, hence the decision to install Debian. Also, for reasons I have yet > to determine, the USB mouse has stopped working, but the builtin touchpad > is working fine and the USB mouse works if I boot up on a live CD. Save out your current XF86Config as /etc/XF86Config.save and copy the live CD's version. Debian's configuration sometimes works and sometimes does not. Knoppix and Mepis do a better job most of the time. You might carry around a ps2 mouse instead, they always work. Open Office will work on your laptop but it won't be crisp. Here's where I get to return a smile. When someone shoots me a 72MB presentation, for example, 192MB of RAM is just not enough. I X forward from or sit at my 1GHz 500MB machine.
