[Rule] Is Gnome/KDE the greatest bloat?

[Ingo Lantschner]

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Am 27.08.2007 um 19:33 schrieb M. Fioretti:

> On Sun, Aug 26, 2007 10:33:28 AM +0200, Ingo Lantschner
>  ingo.lists at vum.at  wrote:
>
>> Xubuntu... uses XFCE, so you have no Gnome/KDE bloat on your systems.
>
> ...
>
> What I mean is that we should realize that for end users who badly
> need to recycle a 4/5 year old computer for SOHO work or study, a
> system made of console-only apps on a bare X will be either
> objectively useless or practically way beyond their skills.

hmh, Xubuntu has both X, a windowmanager and a Desktop (Xfce). You  
can drag&drop to some extend, have a start menu for applications, a  
file-manager, and so on. I was not using Xubuntu for a long time  
myself. My experiences are limited to using several Xubuntu-Desktops  
in virtual machines for trainings on IT-Security, where each student  
had a whole network of up to 5 virtual machines running on his/her  
PC. Imagine if I had used some full equipped Gnome-Desktop (or even  
worse Windows Vista) for the 3 virtual workstations? But Xubuntu was  
fine, running with 64 MB of (virtual) RAM, and students could easily  
start Thunderbird, Firefox, Wireshark, Nessus and so on.

For text-processing there is Abiword pre-installed on Xubuntu- 
Desktops. It can definitely save ODT-Files. I just wrote a small  
testfile, copied it to my OS X machine and opened it there with Neo  
Office (a OpenOffice-Clone) without problems.

> And if one _has_ to install it, one also ends up with a lot of
> code which can be reused for PIM, the other crucial area of any
> SOHO/educational desktop.
I don't know if I got your point: But an address book is included in  
Thunderbird.

Anyway, just have a look at it, LiveCDs are availabe here: http:// 
xubuntu.org/
And if you have VMware, there are virtual Appliancs with Xubuntu  
installed:
http://www.vmware.com/appliances/

An other area, where I used Ubuntu on a limited systems is putting a  
whole Systemmonitoring/Trendanalyses-solution on a Soekris box. This  
is a limited but very reliable hardware (no hard-drive, no fans, very  
low power-consumption). You can find some images (and explanations in  
German) here:
http://lanti.wordpress.com/2007/07/22/ein-kleiner-feiner-systemmonitor/

This time I used Ubuntu-Server (as base for Nagios), which ends up in  
a console-only system using approximately 500 MB on the "HD" (which  
is in fact a Flash-Memory-Card).

Finally I have to say, that I learned a lot of interesting details by  
reading and discussing on this list, which are still valuable for me,  
even outside of the field of recycling outdated hardware.

Thanks, Ingo.

- --
Ingo Lantschner
Vienna/Austria
Mob (+43-664) 143 84 18


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