[ltp] Lightening Debian

Bert Haskins linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org
Mon, 02 May 2005 10:21:57 -0400


cr wrote:

>I've just installed Debian Sarge on my  Thinkpad i1200 (550MHz, 64MB RAM) and 
>it's very overloaded in X with Metacity as the default window manager, it 
>just about grinds to a halt.
>
Your problem may be just in having too little ram.
I have noticed a huge performance difference in fedora 3 between 128 and 
256 MB.
If you watch the hard drive activity led it is easy to see the 
difference in the amount of swapping.

>   I'd hoped it wouldn't, since Debian Woody 
>(with Sawfish as default window manager) runs quite happily, even apps like 
>Opera, Quanta, Gimp etc without a trace of sluggishness.   
>
>I've killed (renamed)  gdm so I now have a command line login, so I can 
>fiddle around and break things with ease and convenience   :)
>
>Two ideas occur to me:
>
>1.  Load a lighter window manager.   Fluxbox (IIRC) is available on the CD's, 
>and I've downloaded Windowmaker and Xfce from debian.org.   
>
>But should I just change   X-window-manager  and leave  X-session-manager  
>pointing to Gnome?
>
>2.   Kill a few daemons.   Desktop-Linux.net suggests doing that, but the 
>apps it mentions (Ksysv and Gnome-system-tools) are of course GUI-based, and 
>the other one, chkconfig, is apparently rpm-based.     Are there any non-X  
>debian equivalents?   
>
>Am I heading in the right direction here?    Or am I missing something? (very 
>probable :)      Any comments welcomed.
>
>cr
>  
>