Light desktop environment + PCBSD

[asym]

Maybe is it possible to also think about old machines? I've got a friend of mine and i wish i could run pcbsd with a light desktop environment such as fluxbox or xfce instead of KDE since he has only 192mb of RAM and a pentium 3 processor. Maybe it could be possible to choose the Desktop Environment during installation or maybe multiple versions of pcbsd could be released such as for example ubuntu runs gnome while kubuntu runs kde. Don't know if someone else agrees or not. Thankx in advance

Regards
Chris.

[gnutux]

I have a Pentium 3 processor w/ 192 MB ram and my laptop runs fine on it. (not much lag)

xboxrulz

[Charles]

The best thing is to buy more RAM because still you will have problems launching OpenOffice.org or running several apps at the same time...

[TerryP]

Maybe is it possible to also think about old machines? I've got a friend of mine and i wish i could run pcbsd with a light desktop environment such as fluxbox or xfce instead of KDE since he has only 192mb of RAM and a pentium 3 processor. Maybe it could be possible to choose the Desktop Environment during installation or maybe multiple versions of pcbsd could be released such as for example ubuntu runs gnome while kubuntu runs kde. Don't know if someone else agrees or not. Thankx in advance

Regards
Chris.

On an HP Vectra P3 500Mhz (katmai) + 340mb RAM and KDE runs great. If I have music playing, am using 2 shells + konqueror / thunder bird and switching between 2 of my 4 desktops (with Gaim in the background) + normal boot up stuff from KDE is when I lag.

And after having WinXP on the same machine and KDE which compares more to my WinXP on a 2.0 Ghz P4 /w 512mb RAM I don't know why people keep calling KDE a system hog, although some programs do drain it.

Would love Blackbox instead of KDE myself.

[scottro]

Why don't you just configure it to boot into textmode, install blackbox from ports and use it? Actually, if you add blackbox, won't the kdm login give you the option of running it?

You can probably simply do it with pkg_add -r blackbox.

[cgill27]

Would it be just that easy to use the XFCE port or pkg_add XFCE and use it, there's nothing specificly tying pcbsd to using KDE is there?

[jdarnold]

I'm pretty amazed at just how peppy the PCBSD/KDE installation is on my far-behind-the-lagging-edge computer I'm running it on right now. I have a 666mhz Celeron "overclocked" :P to 874mhz. Woo hoo! And it works very well. We're doing a Mac OSX port of our software, and I've been building on my PCBSD box first and I'd say it is almost as fast building it as the G5 I use at work.

[Charles]

I would say performance depends on RAM and not on CPU in maybe 80% of cases.

[skrowl]

Try IceWM or XFCE. They're in ports or can be installed with pkg_add -r

[RobNyc]

I've seen KDE to run perfectly fine on my celeron 635mhz 256mb with the following OS... Frugalware, PCBSD, DBSD, Vector and Zenwalk thats about it.


But of course it runs even better on my prescott p4 3.0ghz 1gb ram