I've got an older laptop with 64 MB of memory (Dell Latitude CPi D266XT - okay, old ) and want to install Slackware 11 on it. I don't want to put KDE on it. XFCE - yes, but if anyone has a suggestion for other window managers, please suggest away.

Also, are there any "gotcha's" that I will have to watch out for? I've installed Mandrake 7.2 on this laptop before but didn't care for it.

I will want to use it for writing, playing the more simple games (is there a way to play the GNOME games without GNOME installed??) and Internet surfing via wireless.

XFCE is light. Fluxbox and blackbox are even lighter. That laptop should do fine with XFCE. If you need lighter try fluxbox.

I can't think of any gotcha's. You've installed Slackware before right ? If not, read the slackbook.

Yeah, XFce should run just fine. Try not to have too many services running, disable what you don't absolutely need. With 64 MB RAM your unit may go into swap a bit.

The problem might be Open Office. For everything else there is lightweight choice.

You will need all lightness you can get with 64 MB RAM. Give fluxbox a try. Running firefox will even then make the box swap tho.

General Failure, he doesn't need firefox. There are lightweight dillo, skipstone and kazehakase.

I personally would not run XFCE on 64 MB, especially with it's tendency to leak memory (though this looks to be much improved in 4.4). You definitely want to go with one of the more simplistic WMs, FluxBox should work very well.

As for the browser, that has always been a sticky issue for me on low-end machines. FireFox is simply too resource intensive, I have a laptop that is very similar to polarbear's, and FF is almost unusable on it. Opera actually runs much much better on in. In fact, I have run Opera acceptably on machines as low as 133 MHz.

As for the minimal browsers, I have found most of them to have limited use. Dillo is incredibly small and fast, but it has a lot of trouble rendering anything but the most simplistic sites. Skipstone, while it sounded great on paper, has been as slow (if not slower) than straight Firefox on every machine I have tested it on so far. I was really disappointed with that one. Kazehakase is a new one, I have not heard of it before. But a quick Google reveals it is in the same league as Skipstone, which already makes me dubious.

There are versions of Firefox 1.5 compiled against GTK 1 (which is the last version of FF that could still be compiled against it, as far as I understand) which are pretty responsive. Though obviously they are considerably out of date.

Honestly, I usually just use Links in a terminal. It supports the mouse, and is the fastest page rendering you are going to get on low-end hardware. Going a bit farther, you could even use graphics mode (links -g) on the framebuffer. That would certainly perform better than any X-based browser will, simply because the overhead of X will be off the system.

Open Office would be all but completely out of the question on such a machine. You would be able to run AbiWord acceptably though. Unfortunately AbiWord no longer compiles cleanly on Slackware (due to GNOME dependencies) so you need to wrestle with that a bit. If you are looking for a lightweight office suite, then you probably won't do much better than Siag Office. I can attest that this runs very well on low-end machines, though the last version I tried proved to be fairly unstable, sadly.

Alien_Hominid:

Yeah you're right. But have you tried those? I always found them too leightweight in terms of functionality I have to admit. Dillo for example renders plain html but not much more. Stepstone didn't compile last time I tried. I don't know about kazekahaze, but I wouldn't want to give anyone the impression of being fully able to browse the web with them.

I fully agree with MS3FGX. Those gtk1-firefoxes gnashley built might be a possibility, or Opera. But as I said I wouldn't recommend the other ones as serious all-purpose-browsers. (Even though I really don't want to badmouth them!)

You may want to check out DeLi Linux -- I just read about it at Distro Watch in the weekly column: http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20070521

It's a Slackware-based distribution for older computers.

Regards,

-Drew

Slack with Fluxbox should run ok on that machine. I'd seriously consider upping the RAM a bit if you can. RAM sticks are pretty cheap these days, and even if it's only another 64MB it would help a lot.

FF is definitely too resource hungry to run well on that machine with that small amount of RAM. Try Opera.

I completely agree with masonm. X windows will run on that unit, but, it will be deathly slow. I've run XFce on a Pll 266 with 128 MB RAM and it was tolerable, albeit quite slow. One 64 MB stick of RAM is a great idea.

If you don't want openoffice or can't use it because it is bloated and slow on that computer and only need to import '.doc' (Word) files, then try wv:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/wv/
to convert it to whatever you want, then use some other program to edit it. For example:
http://freshmeat.net/browse/70/?hash...b0fea&offset=0

It is useful. Also, if you need to work with excel '.xls', I prefer gnumeric ... it seems to be lighter than openoffice ... I cannot tell how much lighter, because all my computers have plenty of processing power and RAM Really, 1 more 64 MB stick will help a lot if you wanna run openoffice and FF. If not, try lighter alternatives.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to make suggestions. I have been furiously taking notes in the wirebound notebook I keep by my desktop computers.

Has anyone got any experience with Enlightenment? I've been poking around with it on the Sabayon side of "Big" and it seems interesting, but am unsure if it would be worth the trouble on my small laptop. I will be researching the browser choices mentioned by several of you, also the "DeLi Linux" suggestion as well.

Any more suggestions? If so, throw them my way with thanks.

Idle thought - would I be mistaken in thinking that the 2.4 kernel would be a better choice, given the older hardware? If I should decide to compile a kernel, what should I look for to put in? I have no problems compiling for my desktops, but a laptop is by its nature a little different.

The browser is a tough one. It's difficult to find a nice, light browser ... I too am open to suggestions. But I also know that it is often a trade-off between "lightness" and functionality ... not that it has to be.

I've found skipstone kind of difficult to get working right. I like kazehakase tho, even tho it is a bit unstable at times.

For kernel compiling, try the guide in my sig, especially Chapter 7.