A lot have been said about the apparent "bloat" in current Linux... and I disagree. The same people who typically complained about bloat will typically complain about "but Linux doesn't have XXXX application which I need.." You can CHOOSE not to install the "bloaty" stuff. One man's bloat is another man's lifesaver. As far a bloat is concerned, just blast KDE/Qt, Gnome/GTK out and just use plain X, twm, xterm, Firefox. That's it. If even that is still too "bloaty", do without X, go console full console mode and stick to mutt, and elinks (for mail and browsing). For music you can use mpg123/ogg123. For movies use aaxine (yes you can watch movie in console mode, or for that matter on a VT100, but no sound). p.s. I typically go around using console mode for at least a couple of hours everyday. Console mode with framebuffer at 1024x768 is great!! :-)

On 12/7/05, Jim Leonard <trixter at oldskool.org> wrote: Yeah. I know. For servers I choose custom install, and NOT select even a SINGLE package. After the final reboot, I'll then remove the unwanted stuff manually. Console/framebuffer is like textmode but 128 columns by 47 rows. I don't need screen because you can have 6 virtual consoles. This is of course assuming you have a monitor and a video adapter. If you're on a serial console with a VT100 (i.e. a single session), then screen is a godsend.

SCREEN(1) SCREEN(1) NAME screen - screen manager with VT100/ANSI terminal emulation SYNOPSIS screen [ -options ] [ cmd [ args ] ] screen -r [[pid.]tty[.host]] screen -r sessionowner/[[pid.]tty[.host]] DESCRIPTION Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical ter- minal between several processes (typically interactive shells). Each virtual terminal provides the functions of a DEC VT100 terminal and, in addition, several control functions from the ISO 6429 (ECMA 48, ANSI X3.64) and ISO 2022 standards (e.g. insert/delete line and support for multiple character sets). There is a scrollback history buffer for each virtual terminal and a copy-and-paste mechanism that allows moving text regions between windows. When screen is called, it creates a single window with a shell in it (or the specified command) and then gets out of your way so that you can use the program as you normally would. Then, at any time, you can create new (full-screen) windows with other programs in them (including more shells), kill existing windows, view a list of windows, turn out- put logging on and off, copy-and-paste text between windows, view the scrollback history, switch between windows in whatever manner you wish, etc. All windows run their programs completely independent of each other. Programs continue to run when their window is currently not vis- ible and even when the whole screen session is detached from the user's terminal. When a program terminates, screen (per default) kills the window that contained it. If this window was in the foreground, the display switches to the previous window; if none are left, screen exits. Everything you type is sent to the program running in the current win- dow. The only exception to this is the one keystroke that is used to initiate a command to the window manager. By default, each command begins with a control-a (abbreviated C-a from now on), and is followed by one other keystroke. The command character and all the key bindings can be fully customized to be anything you like, though they are always two characters in length. <for more info, consult man> On 12/7/05, Bert Thomas <bert at brothom.nl> wrote:

Wai-Sun Chia wrote: It's a lot of work to not install bloat, though. Packages for all modern Linux distros tend to be very coarse grain and you get lots of junk that you don't need. Yesterday's example was mplayer - about 12MB for the install, another 12MB for codecs, then it wanted things like lame, divx, theora, xvidcore (I'm reading off the shell's history here :) before it'd even run. There were probably more, but I gave up at that point. I ended up building from source which works fine and does what I need to do without all the extras that are required by a packaged system - but it means that there's no record on the system of any mplayer "package", so it'll be hard to know what to remove if it ever comes to it. *this* is where the problem is - you either get screwed by packages coming with (and requiring) lots of extras that you don't need, or you get screwed by having to build stuff from source. Packages are great if you have gigs of disk space - but the concept of a package is too coarse if you're after a lean manageable system. Hopefully someone with enough clout is thinking about this... But it does do some things well. Yet I see all sorts of KDE apps installed that I don't need - no doubt because the package was "KDE applications", there was something in there that I *did* need, and so I had to install them all. (I'm curious now as to what a "wallet management tool" is... my wallet's in my pocket - what on earth about it needs managing on my computer? :) Building a more modern and integrated environment is a noble and worthy thing to do, I'd say. But only if the underlying architecture is sound and still gives the freedom of choice / control that Unix users have always had. Both KDE and Gnome seem to suffer from a Windows-like philosophy of "install as many features as possible so that we look better than the competition" Comments on how well OSX handles this would be welcome. I suspect the Linux lot missed a trick about 5 years ago and should have designed and built a desktop environment up from scratch rather than just lifting concepts from Windows. Heh. A graphical email client just works better for me, and I couldn't do image editing without a desktop or a graphical web browser, but other than that I tend to just have five or six shell windows open for doing most things. cheers Jules

Sure. I've got a gallant.r.19 X font. It even has an ISO-8859-1 top half (not identical to the one Sun added in recent ROM revs; I hate 8859-1 high halves that distort uppercase letters when they acquire diacritics). ftp.rodents.montreal.qc.ca:/mouse/X/fonts/gallant.r.19.bdf should be what you want. (If you want pcf or snf or some such, just throw bdftopcf or bdftosnf at it....) /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

"Hans Franke" wrote: mmm. please don't tell that to any of my customers who are running linux on powerpc, arm, mips, dm642, etc... chips :-) and, when you look at the performance of 2.6 kernels it's pretty damn good and (my opinion) scales better than pretty much everything other than solaris. 2.4 is a pig, I'll give you that, and has big vm issues, but 2.6 is a huge improvement. NT still a lot of vm and scaling issues as do most *nix kernels (with the exception of solaris). I'm not sure i'd call linux a unix ripoff anymore. That was true at one time but not anymore. and don't get me started on os x. i've been gettting hard crashes (i.e. power cycle required) on a daily basis running 64 bit apps on my g5 imac... I love the 'new mac' but there's still work to be done there. -brad

Jochen Kunz wrote: AIX scales pretty well too. Look at the System p5-595. Takes 2TB RAM without doing anything funky to the box. Also runs 64 multi-core POWER5 chips. Peace... Sridhar

Roger Merchberger wrote: Apple's use of the "Dashboard" name in MacOS X suggests that everyone has forgotten the HP product of the same name from lo these 11 years ago. Which did multiple desktops on Win3.1 and made the 640x480 display on my Win3.1 notebook PC a lot more tolerable. I'm not arguing that it was a first, but there were ways to get that functionality on Windows, long enough ago for them to be on-topic here. -Frank McConnell

On 7/12/05 16:36, "Roger Merchberger" <zmerch at 30below.com> wrote: As far as I'm concerned the winduhs desktop has and will always be a copy of the best bits of every other OS they can cram into it. Vista has already been mentioned as being MacOSX-R-Us and I'm sure the only reason the Linux desktop has grown into Windows-R-Us is to make it acceptable to the masses. (I could go on here about how much I like the SLAX desktop even though it's KDE on top of a Slackware based distro running off a USB key but I won't :o)....it's just....nice) $gods, I've just gone back 10 years to Ultrix on a DECstation when I was running TWM (tim's window manager?) since it was one of the defaults and I'd just managed to download and install fvWM only to discover how fantastic it was! Fans of VNC will be pleased to know the default desktop for a connection is TWM....or at least it is on my SuSE 9.1 webserver. This I have to see! What can I run it on? -- Adrian/Witchy Binary Dinosaurs creator/curator Www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk - the UK's biggest private home computer collection?

I have been using the new Ubuntu (Version 5.1) and like it a lot. My SO is just becoming computer literate and since the box we got for her (70th Birthday present) came with Ubuntu she started using that, successfully. She still doesn't have a clue what a "window" is but is doing email and searching out info on the web for her upcoming trip to Costa Rica. Ubuntu is easy. I use the live disks for diagnosing other systems to see if the problem is hardware or software. If the Ubuntu disk boots more than likely it is not a hardware problem. Paxton Hoag Astoria, OR USA