[TAG] Talkback:160/okopnik.html

[Larry Tobos]

Fantastic !

This is what I was refering to (menu-xdg and the xml way of doing menus-
well, more or less), but my memory betrayed me (oh yeah, long time ago ...)
And I agree, this is the way to go- was just pointing out that in your case
it is even more so: as if you would have a 200 MB ram 32bit system!

More or less to the point: I have an even older Inspiron 5000 lap: PIII 600
MHz, initially 256 MB. Using Metacity + Gnome, it would be very annoying to
try and watch movies. Just switching to a light wm like openbox or icewm
won't cut it, as long as you keep metacity alive, to give you all the
"bling". Going initially to a "bare" openbox session, I had a very spartan
(plug here: Go Green, Go MSU!) right click menu. Then back in Gnome,  I used
Ubuntu's (that's what I have on that machine) package manager to install
some more packages (again, sorry for missing all details- personal RAM has
major refresh problems .. :) ) and probably behind the scenes this installed
the xdg-menu scheme. Now I can happily switch into openbox AND icewm and all
Gnome menus are just a right click away, without Metacity.

Nice !  I can have an acceptable movie experience with scifi.com (hello to
all BSG fans out there), not great, but a-OK. Last week, I upgraded for
about $30 to 384 MB RAM, but I would not say it made a huge difference.
Another testimony to Linux done right.

Sorry for the long post, I hope someone may find it helpful, and maybe you
guys can fill in the missing pieces and write a new article about say
multimedia on crappy old hardware. Or just host a discussion where your
readers share their experiences/experiments.



-----Original Message-----
From: Ben Okopnik [mailto:ben at linuxgazette.net]
To: TAG <tag at lists.linuxgazette.net>
Sent: Wednesday, March 11, 2009 1:51 PM
To: tag at lists.linuxgazette.net
Cc: Larry Tobos
Subject: Re: [TAG] Talkback:160/okopnik.html


On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 07:19:02AM -0400, Larry Tobos wrote:
>    Nice work.

Thanks for the feedback, Larry!

>    Just a couple of points:
>
>    - 374 MB RAM for a 64bit machine is more like half of that on a regular
>    32bit cpu (give and take), unless you specifically optimize your code
>    (which I doubt most of the ports do)

I realize that. The catch-22 here is that bringing the memory up to a
reasonable amount (e.g., 2GB) would cost about half of a brand-new
notebook with that amount of memory - but throwing away a perfectly-good
laptop would be a stupid thing to do as well. What to do?  Linux +
lightweight DM/apps is the best answer I know of.

>    - you could opt for openbox, it supports menus and configuration of the
>    FreeDesktop initiative - in my case the switch was waaay less painful
than
>    going the old way with icewm- once you install obmenu and obconf, your
>    initial GNOME menus are transparently imported. And don't forget to
remove
>    Nautilus, and use instead rox-filer or PCManFM as your file manager.

I've got an even easier way to handle that one: menu-xdg (also from
FreeDesktop.) Once you've installed it, your IceWM (or whatever) menus
will be auto-updated with new apps every time that 'update-menus' is
run.


--
* Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET *