Hi, On Fri, 19 Jan 2007 19:40:21 +0000 "b.n." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Buy a couple spare RAM modules. Surely I agree with your will to build a > minimalistic system, this will help anyway and it's a nice experience, > but RAM is quite cheap and is the magic elisir that allows outdated > machines to be still usable -the CPU is rarely a problem, unless you > often do something quite computationally intensive. Agreed. Anything below 128MB will be sluggish, no matter what. You can only change in what way it is sluggish, at least a bit. > > I am especially looking for a browser to substitute Firefox (it's great, > > but quite a memory hog). I like links, what with its graphical > > capabilities, but it lacks tabs and that's a major downside in my > > vision. I've tried Conkeror for Firefox, but it's too Emacs-centric (vim > > person here) and also disables tabs (or maybe it's me -- I couldn't get > > them to work). > > Did you try Dillo? I don't know if it has tabs but it seems *very* > lightweight. Dillo's nice and all, but it really has problems with complex sites. And don't expect it to show flash animation (I'm not sure if that is good or bad, actually), run Javascript (does it do that to some extend? Last time I had a look it didn't)... > Otherwise maybe Opera? people insist in saying it's really fast and > light (and has tabs:as a matter of fact, Opera invented them!), but I > personally don't know. Opera also is not free software (but it is as in beer). Personally, I like Opera very much. Does all the current pages (minor exceptions, but more page-hickups than real broken pages). But it will need RAM, too. That 128MB rule basically applies here. E.g. my currently opened Opera has a RSS of 76MB -- with 10 tabs open, part of them doing heavy Javascript jobs, like netvibes. > > Any other tips or nifty programs you could link me to would be greatly > > appreciated, especially Ratpoison-related; For instance, C-t is too > > RSI-prone for my taste and conflicts with Firefox's new tab button (I > > want to switch, but I realise fx could prove irreplaceable, mainly due > > to the large userbase). > > Try to see what purposely lightweight distros like DamnSmallLinux, > VectorLinux and Puppy Linux install by default, I think you'll have a > good choice of lightweight packages. However as far as concerning > ratpoison, I know nothing... If the OP likes ratpoison, he might enjoy evilwm (very small memory footprint, read the man page before running). If customization matters, I found pekwm do a very good job at this. Complex, albeit easy configuration. Nice themes -- but I did disable the themes, my WM has only keystrokes and neither borders nor a title bar. When there's need for a full desktop environment, I would suggest Xfce, too. -hwh -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
