Knoppix on an old laptop - alternative to X? Qtopia? SWM?

[guigui]

Hi,

I carry a knoppix cd around to show to all my friends - I really think is fantastic, my sysadmin almost had a heart attack when he thougt I had installed Linux on my machine!

however, I have an old dell laptop (233 mmx, 64mb of ram) and it is just unusable. I know about having a swap file, but I thought that it would be better to use a less resource consuming GUI. Problem is, I don't have the knowledge to tweak knoppix into this... My reasoning is: if a Zaurus runs smoothly Qtopia, my laptop should do too... Am I wrong? Of course, having a knoppix using Qtopia would be ideal for older systems if you still want to have a GUI...

Here are some interesting links:

http://www.linux.org/apps/all/GUI/Window_Managers.html
http://qpe.sourceforge.net/
http://www.small-window-manager.de/
http://blackboxwm.sourceforge.net
http://www.plig.org/xwinman/others.html
http://www.all-day-breakfast.com/wm2/
http://www.boognish.org.uk/enh/lwm/
http://flwm.sourceforge.net/

[Dave_Bechtel]

--If you have it installed to HD (which is really the only way to change window managers permanently) - try:

' apt-get install sawfish '. Very lightweight WM. Even tho I have a decent machine, I still use sawfish for my WM on a daily basis.

--HOWEVER: There are no icons, only menus that are accessed with the mouse middle button; there is no background image for the root window, and there is no pager loaded by default (altho it does support 4 workspaces.)

--It fits me fine since I run everything from rxvt or Konsole anyway. It's KDE and Gnome compatible, so you can run those kinds of progs w/o the KDE startup overhead.

Hi,

I carry a knoppix cd around to show to all my friends - I really think is fantastic, my sysadmin almost had a heart attack when he thougt I had installed Linux on my machine!

however, I have an old dell laptop (233 mmx, 64mb of ram) and it is just unusable. I know about having a swap file, but I thought that it would be better to use a less resource consuming GUI. Problem is, I don't have the knowledge to tweak knoppix into this... My reasoning is: if a Zaurus runs smoothly Qtopia, my laptop should do too... Am I wrong? Of course, having a knoppix using Qtopia would be ideal for older systems if you still want to have a GUI...

Here are some interesting links:

http://www.linux.org/apps/all/GUI/Window_Managers.html
http://qpe.sourceforge.net/
http://www.small-window-manager.de/
http://blackboxwm.sourceforge.net
http://www.plig.org/xwinman/others.html
http://www.all-day-breakfast.com/wm2/
http://www.boognish.org.uk/enh/lwm/
http://flwm.sourceforge.net/

[A. Jorge Garcia]

Why don't you try MORPHIX lite? It runs some apps off a live CD with the ICEWM desktop or window manager (I think) which boots quick and itsn't a RAM hog.

www.morphix.org

Regards,

[Henk Poley]

Why don't you try MORPHIX lite? It runs a some apps off a live CD with wmice (I think) which boots quick and itsn't a RAM hog.

It uses XFCE 4, Knoppix has XFCE 3. You can boot another window manager by pressing F2 at the bootprompt and entering "knoppix desktop=...", xfce and fluxbox are relatively light WMs.