[PLUG] Small distros for older machines

[Matt McKenzie]

On 5/28/07, znmeb at cesmail.net <znmeb at cesmail.net> wrote:
>
> Quoting Rogan Creswick <creswick at gmail.com>:


[snip]

I could never figure out how to work Afterstep -- it did weird things that I
> couldn't understand. Enlightenment was interesting, but I found myself
> spending
> a lot of time messing with the settings. XFCE 4.2 was acceptable, but 4.4was
> almost as big as Gnome. So I ended up with Windowmaker, and that's what I
> run
> today. I think Enlightenment was a close #2 -- if you want or need 128
> desktops, that's the way to go. :)


 I still remember running Enlightenment on top of GNOME as the WM and GM for
RedHat 6/7, for a long while I never thought of running E without the GNOME
panel and other bits.


I think KDE is probably a lost cause, but I still think you can lighten
> Gnome up
> to the point where it's competitive with XFCE and possibly even
> Enlightenment
> and Windowmaker.


Getting any current release of GNOME running as slim as XFCE or WM would be
a feat indeed ;)
Enlightenment has quite a bit more eye-candy so isn't so far off...


> "fasterfox" is probably worth looking into too -- it's an optimized
> > build of firefox for Linux.  I'm going to give it a shot at some
> > point, and I'll report back.
>
> I haven't tried fasterfox, but so far I've had pretty good luck with
> Seamonkey.
> It won't do RSS feeds, but other than that, it does everything Firefox and
> Thunderbird do as far as I can tell. "Dillo" is a really light browser,
> but
> there are lots of sites that do stuff "dillo" can't handle.


Actually FasterFox is a plug-in extension to regular Firefox, and SwiftFox
is a specifically compiled optimized Linux version of Firefox with several
speed optimizations and other tricks.  I run it but haven't measured any
huge noticeable difference.  It is "fast" but I can't tell you exactly how
much faster it is than regular Firefox.

Thus the fasterfox plug-in will work with Firefox on Linux, Mac, and
Windohs.  Swiftfox is only for Linux on Intel/AMD.

Fasterfox:
http://fasterfox.mozdev.org/

Swiftfox:
http://getswiftfox.com/

NB that some network admins would consider the pre-fetching that these do to
be "uncool" from a network load standpoint (so I've heard anyway).

At any rate if you are looking for lean 'n' mean, any Firefox should be a
bit better than the full SeaMonkey suite.  The real small browsers like
Dillo would work even better, for simple pages.  For complex stuff you have
to find a happy middle I suppose.

-- 
----------
Matt M.
LinuxKnight