Paul Copeland wrote: > Hi All, > > I just installed Red Hat 8.0 on my home system. It certainly looks > good, the icons are nice and the fonts are the way fonts should be. > > I previously used KDE but I would use GNOME here simply because it runs > so very well. Nautilus is great as the file browser.
I gotta say, GNOME is really grooving these days. I now run it on my laptop. I was in a meeting with a web designer I do some work for the other day, and I pulled out my notebook to show him some stuff I'd been working on. The look on his face was priceless when he saw GNOME 2. He was truly astonished that linux could "look so good" (he was used to seeing me operate computers with an abundance of black xterms all over the place. > > Mind you it is using 150MB of my 384 MB RAM just with the desktop > running and nothing else. I am not sure how it will run on lower end > systems. In fact on Red Hat's site it states the minimum RAM for > Graphical work is 128 MB. That counts out the machines I use to teach > the kids Linux at Cabra High. Now, the real reason I replied. Linux, by default (please, someone correct me here if I'm wrong) will allocate a massive amount of memory to disk caching. The idea is that as soon as memory is low it can just dump the contents of the cache to disk and BAM! more memory is available. according to /proc/meminfo my machine has about half of its memory allocated to disk caching. Anyway, the reason I mention it is that if you have a machine with a substantial amount of ram in it somewhere at your school, you could run other computers as clients to it with gdm or something. It's fairly straightforward to setup. The program to use is "gdmconfig" on this box. Once it's setup you just run 'X -broadcast' from your client computers and it does the rest of the work for you. What would be really cool is mosix - but jeff will have to elaborate on that. Incidently, I was reading a piece of... literature about the wonders of gentoo. The writer claimed that compiling all his software with aggressive optimization flags made his computer run about twice as fast and use half the memory. Unfortunately my knowledge of compilers is about 20 years old so I don't have a way to evaluate if it's optimization that's doing that. But I'm interested - is anyone here running gentoo? does it live up to the astonishing things I've heard about it? James. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
