thelinuxlink.net

Can't remember who mentioned it recently, but I'm in the process of upgrading an old iMac (G3 266) and probably would have overlooked Debian. The install was almost flawless—the Xorg settings never seem to work on these old G3s—and as of now things are working pretty well.

I beefed up the RAM to 256 MB, and compiled Xfce from source to get the latest Xfce 4.4.0 —we've been spoiled by dependency-checking package managers—and I'm currently compiling a few other programs to slim them down. I just finished compiling a stripped-down Firefox last night, and Sylpheed Claws is handling email like a champ.

I've forgotten a lot about Xfce, and need to start reading again. The main annoyance I have right now is that the icons for certain things like .tar, .tgz, and .zip files don't have a proper icon, and I'm not sure where to define that sort of thing. I know there are some Xfce fans here, so I might call on some of you guys if I can't find the info.

The new Xfce is looking really nice, though. It's pretty quick to start up, even on that old G3, and once the screen comes up, it's pretty much ready to go. There's a lag between launching an app and seeing it come up, but nothing terrible. I'm using Tango icons and a Tango gtk theme, and just need to find a window decoration I like, which is usually the toughest for me.

Firefox isn't exactly speedy, though I haven't noticed a difference between it and IceApe/SeaMonkey so far. I can't think of any other browser that's light and still renders CSS properly. Good CSS and javascript support seem to require a pretty large program no matter what. I really like Thunar, too, though I'm accustomed to the Gnome desktop now, and it's not much of a departure from Nautilus. Haven't tried the volume manager part of Thunar, yet, though I'm impressed that they've added that feature.

Yeah, Xfce 4.4.0 is pretty impressive. Relatively responsive on such modest hardware. Kudos to the developers on this one.

Vogateer wrote: I can't think of any other browser that's light and still renders CSS properly.

i recommend konqueror , ive used it on a p 3 with only 128 mb ram and it ran fine.

Konq usually does depend on a lot of libraries, so I'm a bit worried about compiling that one from source; I would think the dependencies a mess. It seems counterintuitive to load all those qt libraries into a light gtk desktop, but it might balance out, since I really haven't figured out how much I saved by attempting to strip Firefox down. Controlling the number of kio-slaves might lighten the weight of it, though if they only load when needed, even that might not help much. Perhaps it's light enough coming straight from the debian repos. We'll have to see, since I do like Konqueror, even if I'm not wild about the look. Don't remember how to change the icons of a qt app without Control Center, either.

Yeah, Debian runs great on old Mac hardware. I've had Etch running on an old dual-proc PowerMac G4 500mhz since September and it runs quite well.

Have you looked at Epiphany or Galeon? Those seem to be a tad lighter than Firefox, and aren't quite as limited as Dillo.

Opera also seems to run surprisingly well on low end machines.

Yeah, Opera popped into my mind, too! I think I'm running all FLOSS software on there so far, and I'm thinking I might keep it that way. Opera uses the QT toolkit as well, if I remember correctly. I might try Epiphany. Firefox started to hit 100% on my main workstation if I left it on all night, so I started using Epiphany and reserving Firefox for when I needed the Web Developer toolbar and Firebug.

I imagine that dual-proc G4 is a good deal faster than this old G3, so that sounds like it would be a respectable machine. I may have to look into getting some other Mac hardware. People may think I'm nuts, but I still love that G4 cube design. I think I could put up with the lack of speed for such a pretty box. I probably always will love Apple's design, but I'll go with System76 for a lappie if I can afford it.

I can't find the article right now. But somebody posted a comparison of system memory used comparing gnome, kde and xfce, and kde used substantially less system memory when just the desktop and konqueror are loaded compared to gnome + firefox or epiphinay, or xfce + firefox or opera. So even though kde is thought of as heavy on the resources its actually one of the lighter desktop browser combos when used with konqueror. You'd probably want to use a slimmed down kde-core though.

greggh wrote:I can't find the article right now. But somebody posted a comparison of system memory used comparing gnome, kde and xfce, and kde used substantially less system memory when just the desktop and konqueror are loaded compared to gnome + firefox or epiphinay, or xfce + firefox or opera. So even though kde is thought of as heavy on the resources its actually one of the lighter desktop browser combos when used with konqueror. You'd probably want to use a slimmed down kde-core though.

i know of someone on irc who uses a p 100mhz laptop with kde, not only is konqueror fast, so is koffice than openoffice.

Good points for KDE. But is it really that easy to make a slimmed down version? With Gentoo I could probably manage it quite well, but then the upkeep would take more time than I'd like to devote to this machine. It wouldn't hurt to google for it, obviously, but if someone has detailed how he managed to run KDE on low resources, then that would make it a lot easier and I'd be willing to give it a whirl, too. I may beef up a second G3 I have and try it for comparison. Suddenly that second G3 machine is more intriguing. I wouldn't have bought them, but since I received them for free, it seems silly not to spend $30 on RAM to get them up to 256 and try to make them useful.

I'd really much rather run Koffice, as well. I don't really care for Openoffice. At all. I typically try to use Abiword and Gnumeric when I can. Koffice actually has pep.

Vogateer wrote:Konq usually does depend on a lot of libraries, so I'm a bit worried about compiling that one from source; I would think the dependencies a mess.

Konqueror is part of the kdebase components of KDE, I don't think you can install just Konqueror unless you really go through great pains to do the installation very very very manually.

I've also recently switched to Debian Etch at work and it is really nice. I've tried Debian several times before, but never really stuck with it (always ran back to Slackware.) As far as slimming down KDE, I've always tried to turn off as much of the animation things as possible (like when moving windows, don't constantly repaint, eliminating launch feedback, etc.) Basically just turning eye candy way down.

I did install Konqueror, but noticed no speed improvements. May have been because I had Firefox going, too. Then KDE started loading arts and kded and all that. I just wanted a browser, and got a lot of crap to go along with it. Firefox is working well enough, and something else must have righted itself, because Thunar is showing all the proper icons now. Abiword is still nimble, Sylpheed-claws is a bit cluttered, but good, and now I just need to try to get the printer working, and maybe install Inkscape and the Gimp for good measure.