hi everybody,

i hate slow systems, and i was very disappointed reading that lenny eats over 350MB virtual memory on boot, i don't like it. By other hand, who hates lovely coloured desktops offering all comforts? few people..

so, i have this idea: when i use my pc for daily use, films, music and relaxing stuff, i boot up a slow but user-friendly system, and when i need a powerful system (using nastran or other resource sucking programs) i switch to another runlevel, that disables useless things, such as gnome panels, applets, to boot up a very light system, a sort of barebone system.

what do you think about this way?

do you know a better idea to let this way working?

If I care about speed, typically, I just boot into a more minimal environment like LXDE or XFCE. That should keep most of the gnome/kde stuff from starting at all. Then I just have to log out and log back in.

Certainly I've done some runlevel stuff (I like using sysv-rc-conf from the command line). There's nothing wrong with that approach either, but you probably still need a different windowing environment than Gnome or KDE.

Of course, my machine has 2GB of RAM and I rarely don't have enough speed using KDE + Compiz while a MythTV backend and fileserver runs constantly in the background.

infacts all the stuff is working without gdm and gnome. gdm takes a lot of resources, and i want to replace ALL gnome and gdm services while running alternative window managers.

my idea was: i boot with gdm, gnome, applets, then i change runlevel, shutdown gdm and bla bla, start xdm, xfce or similar, and replace all automatic settings like networking (gnome-network-manager) with lighter daemons. but i need to shutdown all useless things and to boot all light things in one command,

telinit 'something'.

this way i can come back when i need; only matters to build up new runlevel, and configure all new speedy apps..another story..