Re: [seul-edu] Best wm for tiny slow computers?

["Ralph M. Deal" <deal@kzoo.edu>]

In response to a request early in Feb. for advice on how to set up
LINUX on a set of ancient machines being offered students at a school
district,  may SEUL members responded, for which I a most grateful
despite
my slow response.  I've finally gotten a real model machine from the
grab bag and have installed RH6.2 and plan to use XFce as the window
manager,
trying to keep all interaction on the gui.  I'll have mount and shutdown
options
available in submenus in XFce so it might work.

The first response was from Felipe Bergo who wrote:

> Forget Gnome and KDE on such machines. here goes a simple list of
> possibilities and impossibilities:
> 
> Impossibilities (don't go for them):
> 
> Sawmill/Sawfish: it relies on Lisp interpreting, not a good
>                  idea for slow boxes.
> Enlightenment:   excessive eye candy that consumes cpu.
> KDE:             too heavy
> Gnome:           too heavy
> 
> Possibilities:
> 
> IceWM:           Ice is probably the most Windows-ish lightweight
>                  window manager, if the users are familiar with windows
>                  and not willing to learn a new interface, IceWM will
>                  provide the usual task bar with a "Start" menu.

I wokred with icewm on my RH7.2 system and found it most attractive but
could not install the latest version I had downloaded in RH6.2, the
problem
having to do with the version of rpm.
 
> WindowMaker:     The best cost/benefit ratio among all. It is not
>                  straightforward for Windows users (will take them
>                  like a week to get used to it) but provides much
>                  functionality with low CPU/memory usage.

I have yet to explore windowmaker but plan to do so.
 
> XFCE:            mimics the Sun CDE environment. It's not so light
>                  but is probably the closer you can get to the complexity
>                  of Gnome/KDE without paying the full price (cpu cycles,
>                  not dollars)

I have chosen XFce, partly because I use it myself and so can trouble
shoot quickly 
when students have problems on their 'new' machines.
 
> Blackbox:        very minimalist WM yet cool-looking, but you need a set
>                  of helper applications to get key shourtcuts and other
>                  functionalities going (bbkeys, application launchers,
>                  the balckbox page will probably recommend some)

Must try blackbox out but haven't done so yet.
 
>> > Most of the monitors in this batch are labelled with names not in the RH
> > LINUX list of recognized monitors so that will be time-consuming. Any
> > suggestions there?
> 
> My experience with "unlabelled" monitors is that most of them fit in the
> "vanilla SVGA that can do interlaced 1024x768 @87Hz" option of
> XF86Config.

So far that works.  Thanks for the advice.
 
> > PS How do I get onto the schoolforge mailing list?
> 
> Go to
> 
> http://schoolforge.net/sfdiscuss.php

Thanks!   Ralph   deal@kzoo.edu