I'm putting Linux on an old PII 350 mhz Dell machine (Lost the Windows 98 disk, thought, "What the hell?"). I've got Gentoo on, but Gnome didn't go that well. Aside from some things that need to be worked out, I was surprised at the sluggishness of it. Is there anything out there a bit slimmer? I'm putting XFce up, but I'm having some difficulties, and I will probably not be able to get a good idea of it's performance until Monday. In the mean time, are there any other suggestions, or is XFce the way to go? I'm giving this box to my mom, so she can do her work (Typing, email, internet, and spreadsheets mostly) without interupting my gaming on my new computer, so the more like Windows, the less I have to teach her.

You can setup any gui to be as user friendly as possible. I recently has some 'doze drones come stay with me and set them up a desktop in Flux that ran very smoothly and did everything they needed it to.

How?

Install Flux.

Install Gkrellm
Edit your .xinitrc to launch Gkrellm at Flux's start:
gkrellm -w
So it's in the slit.
Install the GkrellmLaunch plugins to setup applications to be launched from Gkrellm.
Place the most used applications in this list, click apply and bam, it's done. Now for the /home directory for that user.

Create a directory called documents:
mkdir documents
Create a directory personal:
mkdir personal
And advice the user that this is their version of "My Documents".

We are just about done now, last thing, email.

Grab yourself an easy to use email client that is both fast and light:
sylpheed.
Toss that in the list of applications from Gkrellm, and setup the initial mail info for her.

One minor tidbit:
In the fluxbox menu:
/~.fluxbox/menu
You could add a link to 'help' as the first link:
[exec] (Select for Help) {mozilla http://linuxquestions.org}

And then when she right clicks for the menu, if that's at the top, she can just click it and be brought here in Mozilla.



Cool

Personally sawfish + fspanel works well for me and are both quite light. Or FVVM95

Rus

Or try fvwm95 or whatever it is - she's still probably going to be freaked by a fluxbox, even with as much effort as MasterC put into it.

Does Mozilla run well on a 350? I jump from P100 (no thanks) to 1.1GHz (piece of cake), so I don't know. Maybe try Phoenix or Dillo if Mozilla creeps. I'd say a fully tricked out w3m but that'd be as freaky as flux, probably.

-- Must. Hit. Refresh.

Just some ideas, he could do that with a few other wm's, Flux is just the one I chose. I think on Monday he'll find XFCE to be just fine in terms of ease and speed.



But if he really wanted to, now he has an idea of how to do it with Flux

Cool

Yeah - no objection to more flux users.

I should be paying attention to learning more valuable things but I've been playing with re-theming/skinning flux and xmms - and hey, I learned a little about installing fonts - and I'm in love all over again.

there are LOTS of really good window managers out there. your performance with those could be better than with a DE.

(PS when posting questions on running a gui on an older box it helps to mention the amount of RAM. even on older "slower" boxes de can usually be runn with success providing memory demands can be met. as long as you have about 256 mb ram a DE should run fairly well if not use one of the many WM)

Flux - IceWM

A good Window manager site:

http://www.plig.org/xwinman/

Thank you for the overwhelming reply!

Sadly, my machine has only 128mb of RAM. Now that I think about it, though, I have a few old sticks laying around which I thought were ancient and unuseable, but I never really checked.

Yeah, I wouldn't mind Flux, but I don't think I'd give it to my Mom.

Nope, I'm stuck at 128 mb

twm or blackbox

Ok, XFCE works fine, now that I've got it running. Unfortunetly, after spending 42 hours compiling OpenOffice, I find that it too is too slow to run. Are there any slimmer programs which do the following:

Word Process
Spreadsheet
E-mail
Browse the Internet (Mozilla is working ok, but it's kinda sluggish)
Video/Sound

hehe ... just read these threads and I love these windowmanager / desktop environment debates. If you're looking for something really lightweight, try windowmaker. However, it has been said that KDE is the most windows-esque desktop environment / window manager, but it is most definitely not lightweight. As for you office stuff: is cross-compatibility with M$ office files an issue? I think someone's already suggested some e-mail programs - how happy are you with text-based mode? if so, use pine / mutt for e-mail, and something like lynx for internet. I don't think there are many graphical browsers that are significantly lighter than mozilla
as for video / sound, I use xmms for sound, and mplayer for video, although that's more to do with codecs than lightweight-ed ness

Word Processor:
Xedit, gedit, gvim, AbiWord

Email:
Sylpheed

Browser:
FireBird, Dillo, Galeon, Others

Video/Sound:
No need for anything else:
Mplayer/Gmplayer

Cool

AbiWord is a fast, simple word processor.
Gnumeric as a spreadsheet
Galeon as a browser