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Old 01-11-2016, 04:43 PM   #1
Uzer40239028
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What is the bare minimum I need to run rdesktop on command line install of linux/microcore?


I was reading there is somehow a way to do it without x ?

Or is it impractical?

I like the leanness of microcore command line only but I also want to be able to rdp into my main windows machine.

I imagine x is really heavy and bloated? I feel very reluctant to tarnish my beautiful lean install with a load of bloat like finally acheiving 6% body fat you don't want to do anything to jeopardise that beautiful 6 pack.

So do I have any options or is it X or gtfo? From my cursory reading it appears to be leaning towards the latter.
 
Old 01-11-2016, 08:15 PM   #2
frankbell
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I have not found X to be at all heavy and bloated. What X does is make it possible to use a GUI interface.

Some GUI interfaces (KDE, Gnome) seem heavy and bloated when compared with window managers such as Fluxbox and TWM. (A base X install includes TWM, which is very basic. You open a (series of) terminal window(s) and run every application from the command line.)

This is what top reports regarding X on this machine every as I type. See man top for an explanation for each column header.

Code:
 PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  CPU MEM     TIME+ COMMAND 
1785 root  20  0  184376  41816  23784    S   0.7  0.3  105:43.53   Xorg

Last edited by frankbell; 01-11-2016 at 08:23 PM.
 
Old 01-11-2016, 09:37 PM   #3
jefro
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Some programs do not need a window manager as I recall, like mplayer maybe. There may be some remote desktop that is built to not need a window manager.

I think one WM is evil (something) or such and there is a ratpoison wm that may work. http://xwinman.org/others.php
 
Old 01-12-2016, 01:30 AM   #4
Uzer40239028
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jefro View Post

I think one WM is evil (something) or such and there is a ratpoison wm that may work. http://xwinman.org/others.php
Ummmm what? :P Ah your post makes alot more sense now I read the contents of the list in the link you gave

Last edited by Uzer40239028; 01-12-2016 at 02:05 AM.
 
Old 01-12-2016, 02:25 AM   #5
ondoho
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Uzer40239028 View Post
I imagine x is really heavy and bloated?
...
So do I have any options or is it X or gtfo? From my cursory reading it appears to be leaning towards the latter.
just let me make sure i understand you:
you have a light linux that uses command line only (no graphical user interface), yet you want to use something that allows you to use a graphical user interface?
remotely or not doesn't matter, if you have the graphics on your machine, it requires X.
in Linux, X(org) equals GUI. there's no way around that.

(well there's wayland, but you don't want that. there's also very limited ways to have graphics on a framebuffer console, but i'm 99.9 sure rdesktop cannot utilize that)

edit:
once we have clarified this, we can move on to help you to install a lean X graphical environment.

Last edited by ondoho; 01-12-2016 at 02:27 AM.
 
Old 01-12-2016, 06:49 AM   #6
Uzer40239028
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Ok I get that now.

I was looking at the tinycore repository: http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/tcz_2x.html

There seem to be a few options there but it seems the repo is not updated as some were not there when I tried to search.

How do I install other non repo installs? I've just been dependent on repost so far . Is there any need or do the desktop options look lighweight enough in one of those repo releases? Like I said the first I tried didn't work but I would think at least one of them will still be there.

The only one I can find on that repo list is the hefty GNOME x11 desktop and that is 25megs. That is about twice as much as the tiny core install itself!

The other ones seemed much leaner however do not seem to exist in the repo So guess I need to look at installing the no repo options above.

EDIT:

At first I was thinking I wanted to have a full rdp to access windows but as I thought about it more I don't even need it.

I started to get a gloomy feeling of how I might have to compromise my beautiful lean tinycore/microcore install by installing an obese and ugly gui and ruin all that cli only purist goodness.

But suddenly my heart lightened... as I just thought about it I only want to be able to access files on the windows computer. So that I could read pdf/text files and run python scripts and edit code in vim. All of which I imagine is a breeze to achieve without any gui.

Last edited by Uzer40239028; 01-12-2016 at 04:37 PM.
 
Old 01-14-2016, 11:13 AM   #7
ondoho
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i think you are suffering because of tinycore's obscurity (also looking back at your first thread).

you should stick to a distro's repositories as far as possible.
i don't know why that doesn't seem to be anoption with tinycore, but with all major distros you don't need to stray from that path in 99 percent of all cases.

so i still think that a command line install of any major distro would be better for you, and will do just fine on your 256mb ram machine.

be that debian or ubuntu or some other, they all can be installed without a gui. should take just few hundred megs on your hd, and a few dozen megs in ram.
if you install e.g. fluxbox or openbox on top of that, it should pull in another few hundred megs of dependencies.
then you can choose to start the X server only when you need it.
a simple *box environment should take significantly less than 100MB of your RAM when idle, maybe even 50.
 
  


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