The BDI's are fairly light as they are, the only reason to look 
elsewhere would be on a low memory machine. That said, the rtai kernel 
is included with most distros, and EMC2 is not that difficult to install 
separately, so outside of the convenience of the BDI most distros will 
work. Xubuntu is the lightest of the standard Ubuntu series, and I've 
used it on an old PC with low memory, worked fine driving my lathe for a 
couple of years before I upgraded to a larger (Dell Optiplex by 
coincidence) that was almost being given away at the local used store. 
It's now running Ubuntu 10.4.

As for desktops, Gnome is fairly light as compared to KDE and you can 
run emc2 with any of the available window managers (there are quite a 
few). Personally one of my favourites is MWM since I spent quite a few 
years on Sun boxes with Motif installed.

For a fairly comprehensive list of window managers for linux take a look 
at http://xwinman.org/

Mark


On 11/25/2010 09:13 AM, Neil Baylis wrote:
> I'm about to install EMC on another machine (Dell Optiplex) and was
> wondering if anyone has found benefits from installing a lightweight window
> manager (e.g. xfce, lxde, or even twm) instead of Gnome? I've used this
> machine successfully for EMC before, so I know it works.
>
> Also, is there any benefit to be had from installing a lightweight distro
> (e.g. Arch) rather than Ubuntu?
>
> (Yes, I understand that if I don't use the approved Ubuntu/Emc distro, I'll
> have to integrate RTAI myself etc.)
>
> Neil
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