I've been 'tweaking' the SuSE 7.2 installation on the 32Mb RAM machine and now have 8Mb free RAM once the machine is up and running and a user has logged in to the blackbox window manager. I will be losing a small amount of this memory once I've installed a SAMBA client (looks like 1.3M for smbmount). The main tweaks were to do with making sure that the machine was running as few unnecessary services as possible. The biggest single 'win' was getting rid of tty 2 to 6 (5 sets of 600K). I also got rid of the X console since the user's won't be interested in what it says! I'm using xdm for login since that seems most memory efficient. I had thought that a command line login followed by xinit would use less memory, but it seems to use slightly more. Also, I thought that going from 16Bit colour to 8 bit colour might improve things, but the change caused X to use about 1Mb more RAM! One day I might understand all this stuff, and know why this is :) I am currently musing over the remaining 'memory hogs' to see if I can work my way around to not having them running all the time, or indeed, at all. The potential sources of more free memory are: cron (660K) atd (612K) Since the machines will be switched off every evening and on again in the morning, I suspect that any important jobs these are doing can be done at boot time. klogd (964K) - Kernel logging - if that's all it does then we'll never be looking at the output. Is it important - does it do other stuff, or is there a way of sending stuff to /dev/null syslogd (636K) - as per klogd possibly tty1? (604K) The users will definitely never go there, but is it required for startup? If any gurus have thoughts on the above, I'd love to hear them. Another 3Mb RAM represents nearly a 50% increase in available memory, and it would mean we could run KWord or KSpread without using swap. Thanks to all those who recommended the blackbox window manager. If anyone is interested, I have done a few tweaks to the source to remove or hide a couple of features I thought might be confusing, and I'd be happy to pass them on. Firstly I thought that the toolbar was really just a waste of screen real-estate since it doesn't serve as an application launcher, so I changed the code so it is always invisible. The other thing I didn't like was the way it handles 'iconise' - by hiding the window and making an entry on the 'icons' sub menu. It struck me that this was not very intuitive behaviour - especially for Windows and Risc OS users who expect an iconised window to be visible in some form on screen. Particularly in the context of our small machines, I thought that this behaviour would be likely to cause users to rerun the software - which would have us running out of RAM in no time. So, I have removed the iconise button from the window title bars and also completely got rid of the right button menu from the window title bar. Another outstanding issue I'd like to resolve is to get some visual indication that an application is starting up. Large KDE applications (e.g. Konqueror, KWord) can take 20 - 30 seconds before a window appears on screen. In my office I can tell that something is happening because I can hear the disc thrashing, but in a noisy classroom, the kids will wait a while, assume that they hadn't clicked properly and rerun the application. If anyone knows of any utility which can wrap application start in some kind of hourglass display or similar, please let me know. Cheers -- Phil Driscoll
On Fri, 20 Jul 2001, Phil Driscoll wrote: snip . . .
Thanks to all those who recommended the blackbox window manager. If anyone is interested, I have done a few tweaks to the source to remove or hide a couple of features I thought might be confusing, and I'd be happy to pass them on. Firstly I thought that the toolbar was really just a waste of screen real-estate since it doesn't serve as an application launcher, so I changed the code so it is always invisible. The other thing I didn't like was the way it handles 'iconise' - by hiding the window and making an entry on the 'icons' sub menu. It struck me that this was not very intuitive behaviour - especially for Windows and Risc OS users who expect an iconised window to be visible in some form on screen. Particularly in the context of our small machines, I thought that this behaviour would be likely to cause users to rerun the software - which would have us running out of RAM in no time. So, I have removed the iconise button from the window title bars and also completely got rid of the right button menu from the window title bar.
snip . . . Just as you are getting sorted I thought I would throw in a few ideas to confuse the issue. According to a review in Linux Format magazine blackbox uses 2100k whereas icewm uses only 1000k! If correct that could save you a bit. Ice does have the other advantage for windows users that it looks almost the same as win95, including start button menu accessible by ctrl-esc and taskbar which applications minimize to. The taskbar will even run in autohide mode like win95 for those of us who don't like a cluttered screen. It uses simple textfiles to configure the menu structure etc , and even has a gui tool (icepref) for setting up preferences. just a thought . . . ____________________________________ Giles Nunn - Network Manager Carms Schools ICT Development Centre Tel: +44 01239 710662 Fax: 710985 ____________________________________
On Friday 20 July 2001 14:03, Giles Nunn wrote:
Just as you are getting sorted I thought I would throw in a few ideas to confuse the issue.
According to a review in Linux Format magazine blackbox uses 2100k whereas icewm uses only 1000k! If correct that could save you a bit. Ice does have the other advantage for windows users that it looks almost the same as win95, including start button menu accessible by ctrl-esc and taskbar which applications minimize to. The taskbar will even run in autohide mode like win95 for those of us who don't like a cluttered screen. It uses simple textfiles to configure the menu structure etc , and even has a gui tool (icepref) for setting up preferences.
Just tried it. As installed it actually takes more memory than blackbox - according to Top (which might be the wrong thing to be looking at, and if someone can give me a better measure, then I'll use it) I have 3.5Mb less free memory when running icewm over blackbox. However it is clearly a much more familiar environment for the kids, and it is running a lot of superfluous toys at the moment. I'll strip it down and report back. Cheers -- Phil Driscoll
On Friday 20 July 2001 17:27, Phil Driscoll wrote:
Just tried it. As installed it actually takes more memory than blackbox - according to Top (which might be the wrong thing to be looking at, and if someone can give me a better measure, then I'll use it) I have 3.5Mb less free memory when running icewm over blackbox. However it is clearly a much more familiar environment for the kids, and it is running a lot of superfluous toys at the moment. I'll strip it down and report back.
Cheers
Just built icewm with configure options --disable-i18n -disable-nls and --diable-guievents There was also a --enable-lite option, but this git rid of the task bar etc. After running strip -s on the binaries, I now have a window manager that (according to top) uses 1520K - which compares well with the 1696K for blackbox - especially given the extra functionality. I'll run with it for a few days to see if it cuts the mustard - it's looking good so far! Cheers -- Phil Driscoll
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