Alternative WM on Xubuntu? or other lightweight distro?

[Howard Gibson]

On Sun, 9 Nov 2008 16:42:48 -0500
"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.

Walter,

   I am running Fedora Core_6 on my Pentium II/350.  A year or two ago, I increased my RAM from 256MB to 636MB.

   I installed FVWM2, http://www.fvwm.org.  This window manager is small and fast.  Logging in is very fast.  Read the sample.fvwm2rc files.  The best thing to do is copy one of these into your home directory, and pull them up into a text editor.  Most of what is in there is comments in English.

   I increased my RAM because of Open Office.  At 256MB, browsing seemed to work fine.  Open Office causes paging.  

   I think Gnome is a perfectly good desktop on an old, slow machine.  It is fast enough, and it is user friendly, especially for someone from the Windows world.  KDE is bloatware.

-- 
Howard Gibson 
hgibson-MwcKTmeKVNQ at public.gmane.org
howardg-PadmjKOQAFn3fQ9qLvQP4Q at public.gmane.org 
http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson
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