[Computerbank] Re: [cai-sa] Teen Challenge -Network

[Daniel Stone]

On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 07:51:10AM +0930, Romana Challans scrawled:
> Peter Gossner wrote:
> >Mandrake has some (to a Debianite at least) quirks in some configs that
> >I best leave to Mandrake people to explain,( best to use DrakeConf or
> >whatever the thing is called) ..
> >Both the Installer and desktop (KDE 3) are really slow on low RAM (<
> >64meg) boxen , does cheap  partitioning and strange things with groups /
> >root that I didn't have the time to really investigate on site.
> >I am not sure why it ignores /etc/hostname either but functionally that
> >seemed to make no difference. 
> >It would be great for 128meg boxes. 
> >To my mind performance is way too slow even at 64meg (It's a shame but 
> >KDE 3 / QT3 is  still doing its usual ram suck).

Well, only if you leave everything disabled. Klipper, the clipboard
daemon (clipboard icon, sits in the system tray) is a huge hit that
almost no end-user will use. Disable it. Take out the organizer icon
next to you, and make sure the alarm daemon isn't started on startup
(it's an option when you right-click it). Make sure /tmp/.ICE-unix is
always owned by root. There are a few tricks like this you can do to
squeeze that extra little bit of performance out. Using this method of
disabling what I didn't need, I had a perfectly working and complete KDE
install, usable on a P100 with 64mb of RAM. This was with KDE2, mind,
which was before the great speedup that was KDE3.

> >As an "office/ MS replacement" it probably rocks and of course that call
> >is one that the end users should make.
> >I would feel comfortable offering the default Mandrake to our end users
> >as long as they could see it next to a proper Unix and probably without
> >any "desktop environment" or at least Gnome 2 as a somewhat faster
> >alternative. I guess Mandrake will offer Gnome2 with their next release.
> > (and yes I know that can be confusing).

While GNOME has its place, it does not belong on the desktops of Windows
end-user refugees.

-- 
Daniel Stone                                     <dstone at trinity.unimelb.edu.au>
Developer, Trinity College, University of Melbourne
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