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The Grand GuignolThe Grand GuignolPosted Jun 29, 2009 5:35 UTC (Mon) by eru (subscriber, #2753)In reply to: Shuttle XS29f: Linux Looks Great in Green (LinuxPlanet) by drag Parent article: Shuttle XS29f: Linux Looks Great in Green (LinuxPlanet) It seems to me that any system of similar complexity you are going to use about the same amount of RAM and resources and there isn't anything you can do about it.
Maybe that is true in the context of the X11 GUI architectures (I hope it is not...), but when you look at that Other OS, you find its older revisions run happily with 128M or less while providing as much (or more) user-friendliness as up-to-date Gnome or KDE. I wonder why. Some guesses, probably wrong:
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The Grand Guignol Posted Jun 29, 2009 7:30 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
older versions of linux desktops also worked fine in less memory, but the gnome and kde advocates claim that their desktops do a lot more than the older desktops (linux or windows) did, and that's what needs the memory.
for myself, I really don't need most of the extra 'desktop' features. If I couldpick and choose a couple of support daemons without dragging in the entire mini OS that the gnome and kde have become I would.
The Grand Guignol Posted Jun 29, 2009 9:35 UTC (Mon) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] The largest practical advance in desktop Linux environments during this decade has been that it is now usually possible to install and maintain a desktop Linux, and even access removable media (wow!), without frequent trips to the command line, or manually editing configuration files. This is very good! But I don't think this justifies the resource consumption increases. After all, Windows and Mac systems were doing it long ago, on much less powerful systems. This bloat problem is a bit like the cosmological problem of dark matter...
The Grand Guignol Posted Jun 29, 2009 9:43 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
very little of the huge amount of 'stuff' that is gnome or kde are actually relavent to the two features that you mention.
the X configuration solutions are independant of the desktop (although there are tools available as part of the desktops to tweak the config)
access to removable media is automounter plus a single app, again, not very involved with either gnome or kde
both of these things are available if you the same windowmaker desktop that I ran many years ago with 128k of ram.
the one thing i haven't been able to figure out a clean way to do it in windowmaker is to run multiple monitors, but I haven't really tried in the last year or so.
The Grand Guignol Posted Jun 29, 2009 10:35 UTC (Mon) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] access to removable media is automounter plus a single app, again, not very involved with either gnome or kdeI have sometimes tried the automounter approach, but it has the problem that the media is not noticed when you insert it, only when you access it (and to do so you have to explicitly know where it gets mounted in the directory hierarchy). It is also useful for the GUI to immediately react to the inroduction of the new medium (like make the new medium appear in a file manager). This is where I thought the D-BUS and related stuff comes in. Or are there other ways to get the same effect?
The Grand Guignol Posted Jun 29, 2009 16:59 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
actually now that I think about it more, I think it's done by udev or the hotplug script. hotplug gets informed when something new gets plugged in and detected by the kernel, then it calls udev which mounts the device.
the only place d-bus would get involved (and I'm not sure that it is) is in communication to desktop daemons, and while it's a nice touch to have the new device pop up automagicly, it's not that bad to have to hit refresh to see a new device that you just plugged in.
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