Re: Need help choosing WM for old machines

[Michael A Hamblin <michaelh@utdallas.edu>]

On Sat, 12 Jun 1999 hilaire@iname.com wrote:

> Strange, I also have Gnome with 64 Mb machine and it's working quite
> niceley. Also last friday, I installed at school (32Mb Ram) Gnome with
> Linux 2.2 and really get a boost compare with KDE and Linux 2.0. A good
> point with Gnome, you can use Drag'n Drop between netscpae and Gnome.

war.utdallas.edu (my box) is a P166 w/ 64Mb and runs GNOME just fine.
Outside of stability issues (GNOME crashed in just under a week!) it runs
pretty well. [Normally I have 8 virtual desktops, all loaded with various
apps, two screens devoted to Netscape, an a smattering of screens with 4
xterms running side by side, both in KDE and GNOME.] I don't have a
P100-120 to try but I don't think processor speed would make too much of a
difference...

The only thing I can really think of is that GNOME defaults to using
Enlightenment, and WindowMaker should work with GNOME without a problem, I
think, I haven't tried it myself. Also, icewm is supposed to be GNOME
compliant, and it emulates the feel of the Windows 95 GUI, with a themable
look (Motif, OS/2 3, OS/2 4, Win95, amoung others). The only thing that
really bothers me about it is that the author doesn't reccomend using
focus-follows-mouse with it. Other than that I would probably start using
it full time.

Conviently, I'm writing this mail from a friend's house, and he's got a
P120 set up here with 16Mb of RAM runing RedHat 6.0. I'm pulling up GNOME
right, be back in a sec. Gotta kill this annoying SETI@home client...

...well it is a tad slow early on compared to what I'm used to, but still
pretty usable. I got a couple terms up, GNOME config tool, The GIMP (no
images loaded), calendar app, file browser, and the help tool. It did get
slow when I loaded the file and help tools at the same time. Now that it's
in memory it's just fine, switching desktops is pretty peppy (probably b/c
the default theme doesn't use a lot of pixmaps :)... bringing Netscape
up...[year and a half later]...bringing up Slashdot... ... ... yeah this
is a tad slow, hard drive's grinding away (swapping) ... ... "Top 500
Fastest Computers" ... well I don't think this P120 counts, but outside of
Netscape, the machine seems quite usable. It's also got Pipeline Burst
cache on it, was quite the haus back in it's day (late 95).

I guess then, the question is, could the problems you're having be
hardware related? I wish I could come over and poke at it with you because
I can't really see the machines being that slow without something being
wrong on them.

--
Michael Hamblin            http://www.utdallas.edu/~michaelh/
michaelh@utdallas.edu      http://www.ductape.net/
UTD Linux User Group       Engineering and Computer Science Support x2997