[ltp] Kdrive x server?

[Richard Neill]

cloakable wrote:
> On Tuesday 09 January 2007 03:23, Richard Neill wrote:
>> If you're just trying to make X smaller, you'll find that judicious use
>> of "rm -r" (and "du -sh *") will save you a lot of time. Keep a backup
>> of everything, in case you mess it up. And note that you'll be bypassing
>> your package manager. BUT, most of X consists of drivers and fonts which
>> you probably don't need.

> Yeah, but will that get me down to the sort of sizes kdrive will? There's 
> probably a reason DSL uses it as the default windowmanager.

I'm not quite sure I follow you. Are you talking about:

*  Space used on disk
	=> Just delete bits of Xorg

*  Space used in RAM by the actual device driver and Xorg process
	=> This should be pretty small. Yes, you could use kdrive instead of 
the X driver that you have, or the vesa driver, but I'd guess that 
you'll save a few 100 kB at most.  [kdrive isn't a windowmanager, BTW]

*  RAM used by the *Window manager*
         => Pick a small one. Personally, I like icewm for this. It's 
small although not tiny, but it does have support for most of the usual 
Window-Manager things that you'd expect. If you want even smaller, try 
blackbox.

* RAM used by your GUI toolkit. For a 240, you can probably afford to 
use GTK1 OR GTK2 OR Qt, but not to mix and match. I'd recommend you go 
for GTK2, which allows you to have modern apps like firefox.

* RAM used by the X-server "on behalf of" your applications.

> 
>> I presume you mean 40MB ?
> Yeah, my typo.
>> Also, do you actually mean RAM use or do you mean disk space?
>>
>> If you meant RAM use, then are you aware that `top` doesn't always give
>> you a helpful answer to the question "How much RAM is a process using?".
> True, but I just use it as a guide to find the biggest programs, so I can try 
> to find smaller replacements.

Sadly, top's result here is hugely misleading. Every application you run 
will contribute to making the X-server's RAM consumption look bigger. If 
you want a fair test, make sure you start X in "failsafe" mode without 
even running a window-manager. Then run `top`.

I know that top's information usually causes confusion, although I 
forget what the right answer is. Do google for this - I know I saw a 
good explanation somewhere once!


Best wishes,

Richard