Would like basically a dumbed down Red Hat 9 for my Laptop....

hairston4 · 10-17-2003, 02:18 PM

I picked up an old laptop (pentium 2 170mb of ram) and dont get me wrong, Red Hat 9 RUNS pretty well, but it's even a little too high maintenence for me still. I would relaly like to have GNOME as my graphical interface but really not much goin on. All I need is basically something to run GAIM and a text editor, but look neat (hence why I would like to keep GNOME).

Any distros like that? I can't find any

Wait, I found one, it costs money tho, wtf

randomblast · 10-17-2003, 02:43 PM

use a different window manager, that will help, KDE and GNOME are incredibly bloated for old PC's.
I use fluxbox, but i am almost 40% geek

.
Other good ones are afterstep, windowmaker, and blackbox (fluxbox is based on blackbox, and is a lot better, wjilst still taking up about 600k of RAM).
I have used all of them, but i've only ever really been happy with fluxbox (i skinned it of course)
also, take a look at your services, i doubt you'll need half of them, and they should get you a HUGE speed increase by disabling the unneeded ones.
fluxbox/blackbox are the smallest and are probably the best if you only want gaim and emacs or whatever.

hairston4 · 10-17-2003, 06:32 PM

I've used fluxbox and really, i dont want to anymore :-p

I'm still sort of a linux noob in a sence (about a year under my belt) how would I stop a program from running in the background?

randomblast · 10-18-2003, 05:30 AM

in your case redhat-config-services
if you're unsure what a service is don't touch it, post it here.

ones that can go:-
apache, vsftpd, canna, smb (unless you're using windows file/printer sharing), cups (unless you're using a printer), sshd, squid

P.S.

Quote:

Wait, I found one, it costs money tho, wtf

which distro is that?
all disros are free, as they use the linux kernel which is published under the GNU GPL.

ferrix · 10-18-2003, 04:38 PM

There are a couple of "simplified Red Hats" around: JAMD, Linuxinstall.org, or perhaps Lorma Linux - but they all use KDE. You could probably get one and install Gnome, but by then they would no longer be simplified

So I'd say you'd be better off keeping your Red Hat, just turn off services you don't use, and switch to lighter window manager/desktop. Have a look at XFce4 (at xfce.org) it is really good, nice, clean and light. Not as light as the Blackbox family, but much lighter than KDE or Gnome, while providing similar functionality and feel.