Software and the environment [LWN.net]

Software and the environment

Posted Feb 5, 2009 11:12 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753)
In reply to: Software and the environment by Cato
Parent article: Aleutia E2: low power to the people

Yes, the light-weight distribution variants alleviate the problem somewhat, but they really can only change some of the system layers (like the desktop) less resource-intensive. They cannot make OpenOffice.org or Firefox less bloated. Another problem is that these are oddbal variants which are a bit different to use from mainstream distributions, so less sophisticated users will find it harder to get help with them from books or magazines. The use case I have in mind here is a non-geek relative or friend running a virus-infested Windows98 on an old machine... how to linuxify him/her without purchasing new hardware?

Quote [...] Crunchbang, which runs fine in just 200 MB RAM [...]

See the problem here? 200Mb is *huge* if that is needed just to run the OS and basic desktop utilities without undue delays (as opposed to running some application that really puts lots of memory to good use). Circa 1995 I used to run OS/2 Warp on a 75Mhz Pentium with 32MB. It was about as user-friendly as the today's Linux desktops, and did not feel any slower. So just *where* does all that computing power go? I can think of two visible differences between my 1995 desktop and current: 8-bit vs 24-bit colour, and antialiased fonts, but I don't think that comes even close explaining the difference.

The challenge for these older machines is video - many people expect to be able to see Youtube these days. [...]

I have found a 600Mhz P3 to be quite sufficient for decoding standard definition and below, when you use a well-optimized player (Mplayer seems to be the gold standard here), and your display supports the Xvideo extension properly. But HD content clearly goes out of reach. Does piping video around the house with VNC really work? AFAIK its encoding is not optimized for photorealistic video (as opposed to desktop graphics that have large smooth regions), so you will be transmitting and forcing receiver to decode vastly more bytes than with a real video codec.

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Software and the environment

Posted Feb 5, 2009 11:21 UTC (Thu) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

The lightweight variants usually include alternatives for the bloated apps, e.g. Midori or others for Firefox, or Abiword not OpenOffice. If you are on a really low memory system, you can also use Google Docs. With 200 MB I find that Firefox is fine as long as you don't have too many apps, and use something like Crunchbang or U-Lite - although Xubuntu is billed as low memory it really isn't, and runs very slowly in 200 MB with a lot of swapping. Checking memory usage with htop is quite revealing.

SliTaz is an even lighter variant that looks promising as well. In all these cases you'll need to help the friend/relative get started, but at least Crunchbang and others provide live CDs and an easy install process - no different to standard Ubuntu in that case.

I'm counting a couple of running apps such as browser and word processor in the memory usage. Crunchbang and SliTaz clearly use way less than 200MB just to start up.

As for video, I found a 700 MHz PIII too slow for Youtube Flash videos, which is the key application for Joe Public. You are probably right about VNC not being optimal for video, but perhaps it would work OK for smaller Youtube-sized videos (not full screen) - I have used SSVNC logged into a remote system showing a webcam view from Skype and it does work over the Internet, using SSH over VNC, but not very well. I'm reasonably sure that smaller videos would work fine over 802.11g WiFi, but not SD or HD TV of course.

Software and the environment

Posted Feb 5, 2009 12:25 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

As for video, I found a 700 MHz PIII too slow for Youtube Flash videos, which is the key application for Joe Public.

Odd. I recall having success with Flash with an old machine of about that speed (I don't have access to it right now so cannot check). Video playback is really sensitive to having a correct X11 setup: even a faster processor cannot play video smoothly, if it has to update the screen in the generic way, instead of the Xvideo. The display bit depth may also matter.

Software and the environment

Posted Feb 7, 2009 15:21 UTC (Sat) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

One of the problems is that Flash does not use XVideo. It insists on drawing things to the screen, a pixel at a time... making it painfully slow on all but the most modern processors.