Linux Journal: The Ultimate (but Small) Linux Box!
Aug 20, 2002, 13:00 (6 Talkback[s])
"While we wait for the wine to arrive, let me tantalize you with
some hints from today's menu. It is easy to get carried away with
the idea of a super fast processor (or several), vast amounts of
disk space and virtually endless memory. Unfortunately, that is not
the machine we are all blessed with. In fact, those who might
remember the days of being a poor student certainly will appreciate
that, sometimes, we take what we can get. How, then, does someone
with only modest hardware take advantage of the power of Linux?
"For starters, we could run a very small system by going to some
Linux distributions on a single floppy and ignoring the graphical
environment entirely, but I would like to avoid doing that. The
idea is to create an attractive desktop with some friendly
graphical tools while living within the constraints of limited
resources.
"Here are some interesting numbers: on my new Red Hat 7.3
workstation, running the KDE 3.0 desktop with a single xterm, the
free command shows roughly 34,000KB (not counting buffers and
cache) of memory in use. This is after I subtract the base system
requirements and without running a login manager, such as KDM.
Granted, a lot of KDE's funky new features are running, such as
fading tool tips, pop-up icons, sound themes and so on, but that is
the default install. GNOME 1.4, again with a single xterm, comes in
closer to 27,000KB. Those KDE and GNOME numbers present a sharp
contrast to what I get when I run this IceWM--a mere
7,500KB..."
Complete
Story
Related Stories:
