Alternative WM on Xubuntu? or other lightweight distro?

[Christopher Browne]

On Sun, Nov 9, 2008 at 4:42 PM, Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>  One of my co-workers has two children.  She also has two older laptops
> at home that are too underpowered to run current Windows.  You can see
> where this is leading to.  One is a P4, and will probably be able to
> handle Xubuntu, the "lightweight desktop" version of Ubuntu.  The other
> is a P3.  I know from personal experimentation that a P3 with 128 megs
> of ram is *NOT* up to handling even Xubuntu.
>
>  Can you put in blackbox or fluxbox as the WM for any of the ?Ubuntu
> variants, and drop the "desktop environment", or should we look
> elsewhere for a lighter distro?  I had Gentoo running OK on an ancient
> Dell P3 desktop with 128 megs of ram, by optimizing the daylights out of
> Gentoo.  But while my co-worker has had a bit of experience as and
> end-user with linux/unix at work, I do not recommend Gentoo as your
> first linux.

I'm responding to this using an Acer "netbook" running Ubuntu, and I
have eliminated Metacity & compiz in favour of the keyboard-based WM,
"ratpoison."

In *that* sense, it's certainly practical to replace the "window
manager" portions with lighter-weight things.

Unfortunately, by doing so, I lose the automatic linking-in of bits of
GNOME (e.g. - in terms of system management tools), and this loses me
the ability to follow "Ubuntu-oriented" instructions.  And if you
decline to use "GNOME-based bits," your friends will suffer in the
same fashion.

I feel mighty conflicted about that; on the one hand, the popularity
of Ubuntu has, in part, fallen out of the fact that Canonical &
friends have generated reasonably friendly tools to help newbies
manage their systems.  Unfortunately, as soon as I diverge (via
different window manager), that is lost, and "Ubuntu tips" that expect
to use system menus (as opposed to saying "oh, apt-get install
$PACKAGE_LIST") become useless.

There's a disturbing parallel to the "Windows way," where there's the
strong tradition of "oh, follow these 17 menu paths", which always
tended to discourage people from understanding what might lie behind
them.  That's not *purely* a Windows thing, to be sure; AIX's "smitty"
has some of the same effect on AIX (though it always offers a way to
get at at least some of what lay behind the menues), and MacOS has the
same (where a tool called "CLIX" can offer a look behind the curtain,
which often leads to surprises).

I have an "irritation of the week" that relates; I find the keyboard
on this laptop a tad small, and have been considering hooking up a
Bluetooth keyboard of more convenient size.  (I've got a folding one
that's not currently pairing against my N800; the Apple wireless
keyboard seems likely to be pretty suitable; my one "grand regret" is
that nobody seems to still sell the Happy Hacker's keyboard, which I
*absolutely love*, and I should probably buy another given
opportunity...)

I expect that there's some Ubuntu tool for setting up pairing of
Bluetooth devices; in the absence of the Gnome bits, it's certainly no
longer a "friendly" matter to figure this out.

Does that help?  :-)
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