[RULE] Resource -light apps

[Marco Fioretti]

On Sun, Dec 15, 2002 16:29:19 at 04:29:19PM +0300, Vadim Plessky  plessky at cnt.ru  wrote:
> Hi Marco,
> 
> I don't know what is criteria (for browser or whatever) to be included into 
> RULE project, but I think Konqueror/Embedded canbe a good candidate if you 
> are looking for a *light*browser.
> It has been designed for Embedded environments, therefor its system 
> requirements are quite low.
> 
> BTW: If Mozilla (in for of Phoenix or whatever) is still ok for you, than I 
> guess Konqueror ("full-sized", not Konq/Embedded) should be ok as well.
> It's requirements are lower than of Mozilla.

Vadim,

as far as browser are concerned, we said here some time ago that:

	we should define 3/4 use cases, and some browsers for each, i.e.:

	1	text-only browsing                            (w3m?)
	2	static HTML with images, e.g online docs      (dillo?)
	3	Surfing with JavaScript support               (??????)
	4       Flash and video         (= in a RULE system???) 
		
So far, nothing new, every distro does it. The added criteria in our
case were that somebody with a very limited computer, or just a strong
passion for CLI, would most of the time "self-limit" himself to cases
1 and 2, but still be forced some time (in my case, that would be
home-banking once every two or three weeks) in cases 3 or 4. In such
situations, it would not really matter if the "powerful" browser takes
a lot to start, or if it's slow. Furthermore, even in those moments,
the user would not need the whole KDE.

For the record, I am well conscious that, as you said outside this
list, our screenshots are indeed very behind the desktop state of the
art. I agree, but look at them in the context. Remember that, as far as school and
developing countries are concerned, our attitude is "we'll help you
to achieve equal opportunities (=home banking, GPG privacy, etc..)
without caring for look, themes, etc.. just to start you up with
whatever piece of junk you were given. If, starting from that, you
find a good job which let's you buy a new PC which can run the latest
desktop, 3D games, whatever, we're happy we could help". But I
digress, don't I?

Back to the subject: in this context, start-up times and performance
are less important than disk and RAM usage. Practically speaking, it
means that there are no prejudices against Konqueror /Konq/Embedded
(same for KOffice) as long as somebody helps us to make one single package
(we need RPM, but give us a tarball, and we'll start from there) which
installs on PCs without a compiler *and* has zero or almost zero
dependencies. Of course this is a packaging/distro problem, not a
fault of the developers, but the fact is that if a non programmer
tries to have Konqueror starting from the vanilla packages found in RH
or other distros, he'll have to *fill* his HD

> >From my expereince, I can comfortably open 25-30 windows (with Konqueror) on 
> my Pentium/III-600Mhz-128MB RAM. 
>
Just out of curiosity, how much of this depends from the fact that,
presumably, you already have all KDE running? I ask because here,
without Gnome running all time, Galeon, which is said to be a "fast"
browser" takes much more than Mozilla to start, when I feel like
trying it.
 
Ciao,
		Marco Fioretti



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