South Africa celebrated Freedom Day, Tuesday 27th April– a national holiday to commemorate the first democratic election. So I spent the day attempting to squeeze freedom out of my aging 1.8ghz PC with 1Gb Ram.
The solution to achieving the kind of brute-force computing and speed I need in order to have a faster Web experience was to use a different window manager. Creating an Openbox session which free’s up RAM allows my heavyweight Firefox browser to access more computer resources and hence greater freedom. Less caching means the browser can live totally in RAM, which is what the programme was designed to do.
A minimal environment in which the browser and associated applications take center stage delivers a lot more speed than my current Gnome setup. What’s more, it is gnome-friendly — All my apps just work.
Openbox is still alive –a continuation of the discontinued Blackbox project, a wm which only appears to live on amongst Windows modders. Finding lightweight alterntives to some basic tools took up most my morning and reading through code to implement the decisions and choices wasted the rest of my day, but the end result is probably a lot similar to what is going on in CrunchBang Linux world.
Window manager: Openbox
Dock: Cairo-dock
Panel: Fbpanel, Lxpanel, or XFCE4-panel
File manager: Rox-filer
Package Additions: OInstall
Image-viewer: Feh
Wallpaper manager: Nitrogen
Obconf Theme: Simply Aubergine
Compositor: Xcompmgr
3D Desktop support: 3ddesktop, brightside
Stats: Conky
TODO: Top panel is still a work in progress. None of the candidates do the job well. Issues like menu and icon placement all make the job of installation difficult.
Find way to save the desktop layout on logout. Am busy downloading Oblogout which might fix the problem
Find decent way to load conky at startup. Current configuration fails and it needs to be started manually.
LINKS
Have you tried tint2? It displays separate taskbars for each desktop, along with the icons of running programs. I use it as the taskswitcher, with Xfpanel holding icons for my most-used programs and the systray. Alternatively, tint2 can display its own systray.
One nice thing about Xfpanel is that its “launchers” can launch multiple programs. I have one for graphics programs, one for editors, one for browsers, etc. I reserve the start menu for programs I don’t use so often.
[…] Openbox Freedom Day South Africa celebrated Freedom Day, Tuesday 27th April– a national holiday to commemorate the first democratic election. So I spent the day attempting to squeeze freedom out of my aging 1.8ghz PC with 1Gb Ram. […]
Any old window manager does most of what ‘gnome’ or ‘kde’ supposedly does (not sure exactly what else to be honest).
I think that ubuntu (and gnome, and kde) should be utterly embarrassed that their default setup doesn’t run smoothly and quickly on any machine with 1GB of ram (or even 512MB for that matter, and even less with a bit of tweaking).
For all that extra ram used up, all you get is a few bloated scripts and programmes interfering with your network or adding lag to your sound system and failing to mount memory cards properly when you plug them in.
@cherax
tint2 is great, will revisit it, might be an option if I can get openbox 2 save the number of desktops. Haven’t tried xfpanel yet.
@michael
the problem is browser bloat, java growth, flash inflation, and yes a couple of nasty setup scripts in the environment, I also get the impression I’m getting peercasted out of the water, but after completing this exercise, I returned to a less choked world.
There’s something that I have yet to understand when it comes to Openbox. Maybe all of you knowledgeable fans out there may shed some light on this. I would truly appreciate it…
Ok, so for the newbies reading these sort of posts regarding Openbox (like so many others that I’ve encountered thus far), could you please explain to us what is the difference from installing openbox as a standalone, or on top of another distro?
Please bear with me, for I know I’m having difficulties explaining this.
I mean… On the openbox site/wiki, they say it can be run in conjunction with gnome or kde. Or as a standalone… So, if I have Ubuntu installed and want to try it out, I guess it’s going to work with gnome, right? Simply substituting metacity with openbox, as a wm. Is this right? But doesn’t that also mean that, despite all of the praises to openbox, I will keep on using gnome behind it, consequently maintaining a heavy dependency on RAM, despite using ob?
So, if I really want a snappy installation so as to take advantages of all of this speed that everyone talks about, that would mean that I would have to install it from a “blank” distro, such as debian, arch or ubuntu minimal, right? If this is right, that would mean that I would have to install everything else that’s missing, since I would only have a wm. I would have to pick up copies of a proper file manager, login manager, taskbar manager, wallpaper manager, and so on….
If all of my rambling and noob assessments are right, this means that linux newbies have 2 options:
– Try it out, installing it from our package manager (such as synaptic), and not really see any difference, despite the look and feel;
– Undergo a painful process of trying to figure out every missing piece of the puzzle from a minimal install.
I’m aware that I could go for something like crunchbang or archbang, but then again, I would lose my gnome setup, which I don’t want to.
As such, if one were to keep his/her gnome or kde setup intact, and have ob on the side so as to ease the transition process, none of the openbox goodness would matter anyway, making it as heavy as your other setups.
Sorry for rambling on. I’ve tried countless times to understand this. I’ve read several posts and I’m beginning to become a bit frustrated, since it appears that, for someone like me, it would be useless to install openbox anyway. As much as l like its snappy, simple and bloat-free look, I guess I couldn’t really take advantage of it. Unfortunately, I’m too much of a noob to simply wipe my ubuntu partition, and don’t think it makes sense dual booting with another distro, due to waste of a little space I have left.
Please openbox fanboys, I want to change… Honestly! Is there a solution for this? Do we really have to wipe our distros… Or does gnome+ob become super snappy as well, besides the actual looks of it? Could someone explain?
@XM-S
If you already running an ubuntu distro, install Openbox via your package manager. In Ubuntu Karmic it automatically creates a separate Openbox session. Log out.
If you running GDM or KDM you’ll see see an option to change to Openbox, Openbox/Gnome or Gnome. Choose the Openbox session option if you want to experience the lightening speed.
Appreciate it devidrobertlewis, but that’s what I was afraid of. Apparently I didn’t make myself clear. My bad!
To put it simply, I just want know if having both a gnome and an ob session won’t compromise ob’s performance, since it’s going to rely on everything else from gnome. Even if I switch to ob, in gdm (or any other), I’ll keep on using stuff like nautilus (or dolphin for that matter).
Pulling it from synaptic won’t exactly make it crispy fast. Isn’t that why crunchbang started from scratch? (from an ubuntu minimal install – at least before Statler), precisely because they wanted to throw out the bloat from the full version of Ubuntu?
The way I understand it is this: having a DE like gnome (for instance), simply using openbox, is going to be irrelevant, right? Or is it that the problem with RAM-sucking-DEs (like gnome) is just a the level of their WM (like metacity)?
Oh crap, there I go again. Been eager to learn more about linux, but sometimes I get stuck with something I don’t get and it drives my insane :p Sorry!
X-MS has a valid point there. Will substituting one WM or DE for another lower CPU and RAM usage? That would depend on whether a desktop environment has daemons running, regardless of the WM used.
I do folding@home on all my home computers. The oldest PC I have is a 2000 model Dell with a PIII running at 800 mhz. It only has 512 MB of PC133 RAM. I would add more RAM if I could. Unfortunately, this machine is “maxed out”. Since the machine has an AGP slot, I bought the “largest” AGP card I could find, one with 512 MB of video RAM. The machine isn’t used much, so I sought to tweak it for maximum throughput of folding@home.
I ran the e17 version of PCLOS2010 on it for a couple of weeks. With this setup, f@h was getting about 85% of the CPU’s time. System memory, when using a web browser, began dipping heavily into the swap partition. The more programs loaded, the more sluggish it became. I was awed that the distro would run acceptably on such hardware at all.
But, I continued my search. I next did a net install of Debian LXDE. As I continued running that setup, it became apparent I was facing the same constraints. So, I at last came to Slitaz, which is now my installation of choice for the woefully underpowered machine.
Why Slitaz? First, it uses Openbox window manager. JWM is an alternate, as well as e17, installed from packages. I found that by running e17 instead of Openbox, memory consumption went up slightly. What really opened my eyes was installing Xorg on that distro. You see, Slitaz comes with XVESA, not Xorg. Once I got Xorg installed and running, both CPU and RAM consumption went up considerably. I soon backed out of using Xorg and reverted back to XVESA. “At rest”, with folding@home grabbing all available unused CPU cycles, using Openbox WM with the XVESA base, folding gets an incredible 98% of the CPU cycles. Memory used is about 250 MB. The swap area STILL hasn’t been touched, even when using the Midori or NetSurf web browsers.
I really believe that using XVESA instead of Xorg will make a huge difference on older hardware. Of course, there are drawbacks. You won’t get some of the “eye candy” effects available with some WMs and DEs. And XVESA video display rates are at fixed resolutions, (ie, 1024×768@60hz). But I can say with absolute certainty that the underpowered machine I speak of is snappy and responsive again with its current setup.
@X-MS and djohnston
It really comes down to a question of economy. Which is more economical – Openbox on a 512mb system or Gnome on a 1Gb system? As one expands, grows and evolves, you invariably end up with more processes. Cutting back can save you from the inevitable scenario — hardware has a limit, but software keeps moving forward.
I moved back a notch by setting up an Openbox session. I have no doubt running Slitaz or even DSL-N on my current setup would turn me into a speed demon while removing the eye-candy and community of Ubuntu
The again, there is an argument to be made for creating a lean setup for that one fat application where you spend all your time, the browser If a minimal install does it, then great, but right now, I don’t see the point in sacrificing all my ‘buntu software merely because I want to watch television in my browser.
330734 beers on the wall. sck was here
Dependencies, dependiencies! It’s all about dependencies.
One can run a lightweight WM such as OpenBox (with Xvesa and not Xorg for some extra performance gains as djohnston points out) and then run an application that uses librairies, that is to say depends upon libraries, that are somewhat cpu and or memory hungry whereby the performance gains will be nulled out.
So where to go asks XM-S, others and at one time myself also.
Do we need X only apps with these lightweight Xvesa only WMs in order to fully realize performance gains?
The answer is pretty much, yes.
If you use something like OpenBox there is an ‘X application stack’ that one can use. An X file manager, xfm, an X multimedia player, xmms, an X editor, xed, an X graphics editor, xfig,
a PDF viewer, xpdf, and an X web browser that makes sense: null.
Alas, all is lost for flash.
🙂