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53 Comments
- TuxNuts, on 10/12/2007, -1/+17What a horribly written article...
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+16"Dont forget fdisk.. you'll need it when you realize Ubuntu is an overhyped tub of *****."
I'm sorry we offended you Mr. Gates - DevastatorIIC, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12Um, just XFCE/Xubuntu?
- msikma, on 10/12/2007, -4/+15@ubunterd: Ubuntu may not be for everybody. It would seem that you're more of a Windows guy to me. But to claim that it's an "overhyped tub of *****" seems a bit of a stretch. What did it ever do to you?
- ujjwal, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9There do exist computers slower than that. RAM makes a huge difference, and PC's with 128/256 MB would be quite a bit better off with such applications.
- TuxNuts, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9Download a live CD image and let it do the convincing. No amount of geeks urging you to switch can ever compare to trying it out for yourself. It'll only cost you the disc you burn the ISO to.
- aboron, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9Name should be iluvflames
- regeya, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7I'm going to get lynched for this, but if you have a slower computer yet plenty of RAM, KDE is raftloads faster than GNOME, imho. And if you've not tried both lately, don't bother replying. You can try to impress me with your years of experience, yeah, but unless you've tried 'em both within the last couple of months, I don't care what your opinion is, because it's out of date. (Hey, I think I just killed ZDNet's business model!)
I was up until the last couple of days running a Window Maker setup; mostly WM, with Thunar as the FM and a number of dockapps to replace functionality lost from my panels in KDE. However, I was wanting to work with OO.o Base for a number of reasons and for whatever reason Base seems to use windowmanager hints that WM can't handle. Bummer. Plus dock items can't accept DnD events from Qt and GTK+ apps, which is a real deal-killer. Double bummer.
I've tried XFCE; I even used it back when 'XFCE' stood for 'XForms Cool Environment' and it basically just tied into FVWM. Despite its original appearance fooling people into thinking it was CDE from first glance, and despite their great strides toward making their system into a streamlined desktop alternative, it's just never felt 'right' to me. And don't get me started on the default Xubuntu setup; that's too much like the Ximian GNOME setup for my comfort. The best thing to come out of that, imho, is Thunar, which is excellent. Nautilus and Konqueror devs, pay attention! And KDE devs, pay attention to the GTK+ dialogs. They're excellent as well. That is all. :-) - ujjwal, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7I personally think that a lightweight, full-fledged browser is what the linux desktop misses the most. Firefox, epiphany are fine, but there really isnt anything that can run well on 300mhz/64MB systems, the baseline for xubuntu. Opera comes close but it can't be bundled with distro's out of the box.
- schestowitz, on 10/12/2007, -5/+10True to an extent, but not quite. Xubuntu would save you a lot of work if you're on a slow/no network, which is what the tailoring of disribution is partly about. Xubuntu, on the other hand, will not offer many programs 'out of the box'. It boils down to the question: should we create a separate distro for each customisation or personalised setup of an existing one?
- SPLASTiK, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I'm on an AMD 1.1 with 384MB RAM and Ubuntu runs pretty smoothly.
Sometimes a little slow performance as far as application startup time though, but pretty negligible. I'll be playing online poker through wine while surfing the internet with Firefox with 5 or tabs open, listening to music with Amorak, and chatting Gaim connected to aim, msn and yahoo and its still faster than XP Pro just running MSN Messenger and Firefox :P
I'd have to agree with the above, the RAM to a great extent is what kills the machine. Some of my friends with similar computers (even faster processor) have 256MB and running Ubuntu on them seems a lot slower. - arjie, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Well dillo doesn't handle CSS perfectly. It's fine for rudimentary browsing, but checking Gmail in it doesn't work for me.
- ubuwalker31, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5XFCE or Xubuntu-desktop ontop of Ubuntu doesn't work very well, IMHO, for slower computers. Before moving my mother over to a 3 year old computer, she had a 7 year old 300Mhz machine running Ubuntu Hoary. It was slow. Installing Xubuntu didn't work, I got kernal traps. What did help was installing xfce over gnome. It was still slow as molasses though. YMMV.
If your computer is *really* slow, so slow that Ubuntu's normal apps aren't working, I think that switching to plain Debian or DSL or Puppy is a better route than Xubuntu or XFCE. - bestadvocate, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5@schestowitz
I'm thinking, as long as people are willing to do the work, there's no reason to stop um. Besides Ubuntu derivatives are very computable with Ubuntu so there's no real loss of developer power, just better package support in the Ubuntu repositories. - tastypastry, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4I just installed Ubuntu on my girlfriends PC (PIII, 384 RAM). Ubuntu is running a little slow. This should help out.
- FreyrVanir, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Personally I consider MPlayer the media player of choice for low end systems or even high end systems. If you take the two minutes to learn the keyboard shortcuts and setup your file manager to play files correctly. I use thunar to browse my files and if you right click on a file and choose "Open with other application" then "custom commands" and paste this in.
Video Files: mplayer %f
Audio Files: aterm -e mplayer %f
Video files it just pops up the video window and starts playing and as long a the window is currently selected you can use keyboard shortcuts to manage the file. Audio files pop up in a super light weight terminal. that is mostly just there so you can select that window and manage the audio file. You can also use xterm if you have it installed.
There is a file called config in the mplayer folder in your home directory. Here is whats in mine...
nortc=1
nojoystick=1
nolirc=1
vo=xv
ao=alsa
fs=1
osdlevel=3
alang=eng
slang=eng
When i'm playing mp3 files my cpu usage is less then 3% on a 866MHz P3-M. And even high rez video files rarely brake 50% with most at less then 30%. A 350MB divx file running at 640x360 uses less then 25%.
I like mplayer because you don't need a huge cpu and memory using gui to play a file. It doesn't have alot bling but it does have a bang. I have yet to find any non drm protected files it will not play. - geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I'm on a Freescale MX21 (ARM) running at 266MHz with 32MB of RAM and my computer seems to be just fine.
- antechinus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Ubuntu really is not an appropriate distro for a small/slow machine. Try Puppy Linux - the whole thing fits in 70MB or less, and it runs like ***** off a shovel.
http://www.puppylinux.org/user/viewpage.php?page_id=1 - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2c(*w* c||
oh hi, i upgraded ur ram - bestadvocate, on 10/12/2007, -5/+7How could he give a shout out to Epiphany for slower computers, everyone knows Dillo is the king of the light weight web browsers. Second off moc or mocp (same program) are much better than mpg123 (don't forget to install the ffmpeg support for moc).
Heres some powerful programs that are ultra fast: that is consul based programs.
Midnight Commander: mc - file browser if you dont know already
lynx - text based web browser,
Moc: mocp - great music playing program, easy to use interface.
Your favorite old school text editor (emacs, vim, whatever)
instant messaging: centericq
IRC chat: BitchX - the best IRC program ever. Sorry X-Chat.
And don't forget gpm for mouse support in your consul!
Have fun in the cpu ghetto. - ArielMT, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2CSS in Dillo
http://www.dillo.org/CSS.html - Lobster, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Puppy is gorgeous. Fast. Works. Complete. You do not even need a hard disk to run it. Ubuntu is an elephant.
http://www.tmxxine.com/p3/index.html - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Depends on your definition of full-fledged.
dillo and links (it has a graphics mode) work fine for most sites. I believe they might even support javascript, not sure to what degree though.
Flash/youtube might be out but thats about it. CSS didn't seem to work for me on digg with dillo. The problem is that when you implement those kinds of things you end up with a bloated browser anyway, because things like CSS and javascript are bloat (although useful bloat)
Theres also khtml engine browsers like kmellon and konqueror, not sure how lite weight khtml is though, but its probably liter than gecko. - omgcthulhu, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Thanx a lot for the info. I like such articles. http://chocozone.blogspot.com
- EvilGnomeAndy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Finally -- programs based on consuls!
- ujjwal, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I have used dillo quite a lot, and its more than flash/youtube which is out. It really works well only for plain HTML.
CSS and javascript may be more complex to render, but I don't think you can call them bloat... anyway the main problem in firefox atleast is perhaps XUL. Something like the mozilla to phoenix shift is probably required for firefox now..
Yeah KHTML is probably lighter than gecko but is there any thing other than konq which uses it? Konqueror pulls in the whole kde libraries which are far from light weight.. - PsychTouch, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2about point number 13 (changing file manager), how do i change it in kde?
- mikehartor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Not very clever post, but... I've heard about this month ago, but I can't remember where exactly.
- moft, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3"Any smart person with a Celeron 1.4 and 256MB of RAM wouldn't install Ubuntu... he'd install Archlinux or DSL."
if you're a smart person, you'd also try sex with an erection - it's alot better than trying to go all minimal. why not just enjoy the eye candy/ease of everything/community?
computing isn't about trying to have 90% of your ram free all the time.
/does not justify v*sta - regeya, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1For me, the real deal-maker is that I have a desktop OS that does what I need with a minimum of fuss, and it just sits there and runs, just as an operating system should. There's very little wankery, really. You don't have registry repair/compacting utilities because you don't need them. You don't have a plethora of antivirus solutions because they're largely unnecessary. From the Mac side, you don't have things like 3rd-party filesystem rebuilders and you don't have a 'Repair Permissions' utility because you really don't run into problems with installers (including official OS updates) trampling on permissions and leaving them set wrong.
I suppose as the design of Linux systems gets more complex and more clever, we'll see more Windows and MacOS style problems with dirty caches and whatnot, but thank God we don't have that problem right now. :-)
Now as for what you get out of the deal, well, if you're already using Firefox as your browser and OpenOffice for your office suite, you get those right on the CD. If you're not convinced, get the mainstream installer CD and boot it! The installer disk (Ubuntu and Kubuntu both) is a LiveCD.
I've run into some real show-stoppers on Edgy, but they're largely my own fault. If I worked for a mainstream computer media outlet, I could write a long rant about how, say, Edgy's lack of proper LVM2 support means that Linux "isn't ready", but there's so much that just simply *works* that I'm pleased to report that you can, in most cases, stop worrying about being a "home admin" and get back to the business of computers being used to Get Stuff Done(TM). - reed311, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I've tried the Ubuntu live discs a few times and each time there is a serious problem. Most recently the desktop was all garbaled and I couldn't click on anything. I have a very competitive computer and this is just not acceptable in 2007.
- ArielMT, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@arjie
I have no earthly idea. The only things I know for sure are that dillo still starts up so fast that it's ready before I am, and that every site I've loaded in it had no CSS styling applied at all that I could see. - sovok, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Does it support *ahem* selecting and copying text yet? Last time i checked it didn't...
But disregarding that, it's the fastest graphical browser. - makario, on 09/03/2009, -0/+1Woah, woah! Calm down, jono10.
The people digging you down may not be Ubuntu users. They may be Ubuntu haters. Digg really has nothing to do with Ubuntu; don't judge Ubuntu because of diggers.
Also, don't fret if you get dugg down. It's not the end of the world. - cozinator, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@jono: a word to the wise: Nothing will get you dugg down more than bitching about being dugg down.
- arjie, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Thanks ArielMT, does it increase dillo's memory usage by much?
And FreyrVanir, I agree, I use mplayer on a 1GHz Celeron and it seems to barely touch the CPU. I love mplayer, simplest and most beautiful media player I've ever used. - shenzi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"IBM Thinkpad Cel 1.4Ghz 256 MB RAM"
I think the RAM is the issue here... 1.4Ghz is more than enough computation power to run basic applications like Firefox, Word, Excel, or whatever. I have a PIII 600 Mhz with 768 ram, and those basic apps that he is talking about replacing with more lightweight ones run fine. Not to mention that I'm on XP instead of Ubuntu. IMO the largest bottlenecks are disk swapping due to lack of adequate RAM, and possibly making that worse, a hard drive with low RPM, which are common in laptops (4200 rpm!). - fartonmyear, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0what a perfect time for this article. i'm about to install ubuntu on a 564mhz 384mb ram machine.
- falloutsyndrome, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Let us convince you buy shoving a little red thumb up your ass.
- moft, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0i think ur getting dugg down because your asking an extremely general question.
and this isn't a help board, and the people reading this probably don't give a ***** what you do or dont choose to use (so a boycott based on being dugg down is kinda naive).
..ubuntu has a community support forum (hint, hint)
just pick a distro and say: "i'm a [instert distroname] user" - cry0x, on 10/12/2007, -7/+7Any smart person with a Celeron 1.4 and 256MB of RAM wouldn't install Ubuntu... he'd install Archlinux or DSL.
Installing Ubuntu and then only running low-memory applications seems counterintuitive to me. - mhmdkhamis, on 10/13/2007, -0/+0http://www.paramegsoft.com/
good
http://girls.paramegsoft.com/ - meatstick, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0damn i love chicken
- redbone, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Like TuxNuts said, try the Live CD.
I don't care to sit here and try to convince anybody on the internet of anything, but I will tell you why I use ubuntu. Ubuntu does absolutely everything I need it to do, and there's far less hand-wringing over security, software costs and updates. I see very little reason to stick with Windows, unless there's some specific Windows-only games you like.
But that's just my opinion. If you like Windows and you aren't willing to learn a new operating system, then why even bother with this whole "convince me" stuff? Go find out for yourself if it's worth your time. - pledomobil, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0Dugg that. Seems the server is down.
- zugzub, on 10/12/2007, -8/+3I don't get it either, I'm running it on an amd 1.4Ghz with only 512megs of ram and Ubuntu zips right along.
- namelyk, on 10/12/2007, -9/+3I don't get it.
- jono10, on 10/12/2007, -7/+1Thankyou for your replies. I am open to it But I didn't mention that I am the Computer Admin at home with 4 children and a wife who aren't very computer literate. I have tried a couple of Live discs that come with magazines and am impressed but not sure the family will make the change. I changed them over to open office with the argument that we can always have the latest open office but would never be able to justify upgrading MS office so it would be out of date one day. I will look further into dual booting to maybe slowly ween them over. Anyway, thankyou to all the developers etc for giving us a choice.
- goodbeershow, on 10/12/2007, -10/+4Put down the legos and buy more ram!
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