On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 11:45 AM, Rob OpenSuSE
2009/1/13 Larry Stotler
: On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 10:36 AM, Matt Sealey
wrote: Agreed. However, since openSUSE is one of those kitchen sink thrown in distros, they have to balance it.
I don't expect to run a full desktop like KDE or Gnome on them, but it would be nice to be able to run a basic like TinyWM and Firefox. In that case, you don't need much other than the services to start the system, and networking for wired or wireless.
So have you tried using a netinstall, and then selecting pure X or XFCE? There's also LXDE which you may be able to try out later, from OBS.
Xfce is better but it's still not "officially" supported by SUSE so the actual integration into the rest of SUSE as a whole is absolutely terrible. No SUSE theming, the boot manager is ugly-as-sin xdm (which is f**king crazy since the installer drags in gdm), all the settings apps are just dumped into a big long menu (mixing Xfce, GNOME and YaST choices which means scrolling 3 pages to find anything), panels are set to their defaults, you can't GET to anything useful or DO anything useful on this desktop. SUSE has traditionally set up the default desktop to at least be windows-alike in nature to make people transitioning more comfortable. Not the case with Xfce, and not because they decided "people like it better that way". And that means, not even a green desktop by default.
You have to realise that the memory required to access modern websites is high, so old low memory hardware (now 96MiB and 144MiB) just aren't going to be realistic choices, for general Desktop usage.
This is not old low memory hardware but specifically designed new
hardware. 128MB was determined a couple years back to be a
cost-effective and pretty usable amount of memory to run something
like Xfce in. Between 10.3 and 11.1 it's changed and while nothing
changed about Xfce (it's still ugly, and useless, but the only thing
that will actually get to desktop without forcing swap usage) the rest
of the system has bloated out past the line. I have nothing left in
11.1 but to have the system swap.
If you imagine the efforts on LTSP etc., a thin client needn't and
definitely shouldn't be specced like a "general desktop". If you
needed a 2GHz dual core and 2GB of RAM in every thin client, what
would the point of having thin clients be? Where is the cost or power
saving? It is a dumb concept, but this is what Linux forces. I
remember we did get a full GNOME desktop with Compiz enabled running
on our hardware;
http://www.powerdeveloper.org/movie/iris
Do you see any huge slowdowns? This is a 400MHz PowerPC, with no L2
cache, 128MB of RAM and a 64MB Radeon 9250 (r200). This demo was built
with Gentoo. You can see it slowing a little at points; but this is
lack of CPU power, and not much else.
--
Matt Sealey