[plug] kdesktop & icewm together

[Gavin Chester]

On Mon, 2007-04-09 at 09:28 +0800, Michael Holland wrote:
> On Sun, 8 Apr 2007, Gavin Chester wrote:
> 
> > Background: I have a low-end laptop of 400MHz with only 128Kb ram.  It
> 
> I'm surprised you can even get Grub or LILO to boot with 128K. Maybe
> Xenix?

I forgot to mention that it's only a 4Gb drive as well ;-)  So, nah, I
haven't resorted to puppy or dsl or other light-weight distros - I
managed to get a slightly pruned version of opensuse 10.1 on this lappie
with latest firefox, openoffice, et al :-) If you want to know how: The
only requirement was to do the install in text mode, because it would
sometimes freeze part way thru' the install in graphics mode.  It would
also freeze if I got too choosy about package selection, so I accepted
the basics and then added/removed packages afterwards using 'smart'
post-install.  I've got 2Gb of packages on a 3Gb root partition with a
1Gb /home.  This works ok for a backup, cheap lappie to take to uni. for
word processing, email and surfing for reference material.   

BTW: I don't think I'd take a newer lappie to uni.  One poor ba$tard in
my group at ECU had his near-new lappie lifted from a seminar room when
we all went out for a smoko for 5mins :-(  It wasn't even out in the
open.  The culprit was spotted, but when we realised what he'd done he
was long gone.  The thief was being systematic about it - apparently
some of the staff offices had signs of a screwdriver having been forced
into their door locks.

> Try using ps or top to see how much memory kdesktop is using.
> I just tried launching kdesktop on a low-end server, and it soon
> showed 58MB resident!! (ie actually used, not just virtual. including
> kdeinit and the five other KDE processes that it started.)

Hmm, well I _had_ done that before and kdesktop only occasionally peaked
among the top memory hogs.  ATM on this lappie, I'm running a couple of
'K' apps: konqueror and konsole (the latter with four shells active) and
had started kdesktop.  Of course, there are numerous 'K' processes now
running in the background, but the biggest memory users are firefox (20M
real memory), X (16Mb), Konqueror (14Mb - because it's doing a big file
copy as I type), and konsole (5Kb).  Numerous other 'K' processes are
sitting there doing nothing, occasionally peaking a bit during certain
operations, and icewm and kdesktop aren't even showing in my top 30
processes.  Needless to say, this lappie can do a lot of disc thrashing
into swap (256Kb) when things get really demanding.  

As you'd expect, I start to have trouble when running evolution, firefox
(>30 tabs), konsole, openoffice, kpdf, etc all open at once and then
decide to do a "smart install xxx" ;-).  Smart is a real memory hog.  If
I keep calm and only run 2-3 major apps then this lappie does the job
pretty good without too much disc thrashing.  All hail Linux!  Try doing
that with WinXP - let alone Vista.
  
> > So, my question is: is this combo a workable option, or would I be
> > bogging ice down to run kdesktop?
> 
> Ice will be OK, but they won't work together, and you'll have way less RAM
> left for any large applications. Why not just try it?

See my report above, for your interest.  But, they DO seem to work
together - at least in the sense that icewm menus, toolbar and settings
are all dominant, but kdesktop gives the desktop background, icons and
right-click menu.  I've not found any conflict so far, except that the
ice desktop is killed when you start kdesktop and then there is a 'blank
void' left when you subsequently kill kdesktop.  I haven't read enough
to know how to restart the ice desktop, other than restarting X and
logging in again.

> BTW, I just tried icewm for the first time, and am very impressed for a
> WM that only uses a few MB of RAM. (much less than a single gnome applet)

It's great, but can take some adapting to get used to it. I have tried
it before and it wasn't to my taste, preferring Xfce instead.  But
recent Xfce versions are getting bloated compared to icewm, so I ended
up customising the icewm toolbar and preferences (all done by text
files) and now I have it looking how I like.  It has some quirks, but
it's great for low-end machines.  I like it better than blackbox, fvwm.
and the other low-end WMs.  Each to their own ;-)

Well, I guess you helped me answer my question ;-)  It doesn't seem to
be the trouble that I thought it might, and have desktop icons with
icewm :-) Curious to hear anyone else trying it and seeing what they
get.

Gavin