[aclug-L] Re: Linux Time-Table

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Before replying to the rest of your message, I must say that I disagree with
your premise that "an operationg system must present a speedy graphical
interface on a P100 with 32MB of RAM in order to be a good desktop operating
system."  I think that the P100 case is largely irrelevant these days.

On Mon, Nov 25, 2002 at 11:09:40PM -0600, Jonathan Hall wrote:

> The fact that X requires about 128mb RAM minimum to operate is a problem,

Not true, even for XFree86.  Check out:

http://www.superant.com/smalllinux/tinyX01.html
   This person runs X in 4 MB

Debian even contains xserver-tinyx-fbdev.

KDrive TinyX is supposed to have a memory footprint of less than 1 MB.

More information:
  http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/kdrive.html
> 
> My 486 laptop, as an old example, has 24mb RAM and runs Win95 "comfortably."
> It takes me about 30 seconds to open a web browser.
> 
> In X on the same system, it takes a good 5 minutes to open a web browser,
> due to swapping.

What web browser?

The Skipstone web browser is particularly nice for low-resource systems.  It
is based on Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine, which means that it has full
support for modern features like Javascript, frames, SSL, etc.  It appears
to require 13MB of RAM after loading pages on my system.  That would be less
on a system running TinyX or without a 2304x1024 virtual TrueColor display :-)

If you are even more memory-conscious, use dillo.  It requires only 3MB of
RAM to present a graphical interface, but does not currently support
Javascript or frames.

> Granted, a 486 is not exactly a good measure of how modern operating systems
> should perform.  But the fact that I can run the latest version of most

True.  (What I said above).

> applications on a 486 with Windows (slowly, granted) but not in X, makes it
> at least a somewhat valid comparison, IMO.

Try that with Office 2002 or the latest version of Photoshop :-)

> Of course, compared to Windows XP, X is a great improvement, as far as
> system requirements are concerned.  But I think that, too, is a flawed
> comparison, b/c Windows XP doesn't use the resources it consumes for
> anything useful :)

Heh

> Anyway... I just don't see X as a good option for a general-purpose GUI.

It sounds like you don't see anything newer than Windows 98 as a good option
either, because they won't run on a P100 with 32MB of RAM.  I'm just not
sure that's a good benchmark.

> That's not to say that OpenSource couldn't come up with something better :)

Seems to me that it might have already :-)

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