I used to use Afterstep as a window manager back in the days when I was
running 20 Meg on a 486 DX2 66 MHz. It may have grown since then, but I bet
that it has a lot smaller foot print then KDE or GNOME. There are a number of
low memory window managers out there. I would say just look for window
managers slated for low memory or pick up an old school window manager like
motif.
I would not recommend running netscape on a machine with that much memory.
Even on a high memory system I would not recommend running netscape for long
periods of time. I have noticed that ld-linux.so.2 library that Netscape uses
leaks memory like a civ and before you know it a little 12 meg lib balloons to
hundreds of megs. (It may even be designed to take up less than 12 megs, but
it leeks so badly that it is hard to say.) There are lots of other major
problems with Netscape for Linux, so I wouldn't recommend its usage if it can
be avoided. There are other browsers like (text based) lynx that seem to work
pretty good though.
I think Linux does have lots of strong points that could appeal to a
programmer type. (I hold a part time programming job while I am going though
college and I have been a Linux user for 4 years). As far as I know of UNIX
was originally designed to be a development OS for MULTICS. Linux (a UNIX
variant) comes with a vary broad array of well developed programming tools and
compilers. Its source code comes free. It has a design that makes some sort
of sense unlike MS. There is always more than one way to do something. (MS
herds you down one path that is usually fundamentally flawed, riddled with
bugs, and very limited in flexibility.) Unless there is something majorly
wrong with your hardware setup, then it is a rock solid OS. I have even seen
such things go wrong as a video card shorting out and exploding on the PCI bus
where the NIC and the SCSI controller where and still be able to remotely log
in and shut down the system gracefully, though it was a bit slow and jerky.
(When we brought the m/b and video card back to the store where it had been
purchased, they said that the slot that the video card was on, which was a bit
charred, was completely dead and the other slots where malfunctioning. On the
video card there was a big chunk of ceramic material missing and the IC on the
main chip was exposed. Plus there where a couple blown capacitors, burnt
traces, and a few melted solder joints.) Also I once opened a Linux box to
put in a bigger hard drive to find that the fan on the 400 MHz K6-2 CPU was
frozen, but yet the system never glitched up in its 50+ days of uptime.
Asheesh Laroia wrote:
> Hello everyone!
>
> I have a friend who I'm trying to introduce to Linux. I installed
> Linux-Mandrake 7.1 on his system, and everything worked. However, it is
> extremely slow at networking, and swaps all the time. His machine is
> connected to a Road Runner cable modem, so the internet access should be
> extremely fast, but it's not. Netscape gets ~2K/second, and is "slower
> than Windows." He also has Win95 installed in /dev/hda1.
>
> It's installed on a 900MB / (ext2) partition, and has a 120MB swap
> partition (hda5 and hda6, respectively).
>
> If any of you have Linux-based systems running on 32MB, and don't feel
> it's frightfully slow to use GNOME or KDE with it, please say so. If you
> have any ideas as to how to speed up his machine (I've disabled apache,
> bind, and other server daemons), please share them with me. He is an
> intelligent person, and a very good computer user, and a programmer. He
> insists he's going to delete it tomorrow, and I'd rather see him happy,
> using Linux for his everyday stuff.
>
> In a related question, does the new Helix GNOME preview use less RAM than
> its predecessor? I need to know because he needs whatever is the lightest
> windows-ish GUI he can get (no, fvwm is not a valid choice!).
>
> I've also asked my local LUG, but it seems that LUGOR (LUG Of Rochester
> (New York State), USA) is out on summer break.
>
> Please help.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Asheesh Laroia.
