Comments on: Build a lightweight graphical system in Ubuntu

By: davide

davide — Tue, 10 May 2011 10:19:38 +0000

Sorry for the previous post, the firs question mark was supposed to be an exclamation mark!

By: davide

davide — Tue, 10 May 2011 10:17:21 +0000

Hi there, I really appreciated your article here?
Do you think it’s possible to get a working version of cli ubuntu with svgalib installed to make the arachne internet suite work?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arachne_(web_browser)
http://www.glennmcc.org/aralinux/

Thanks a lot!

Davide

By: Bloat is in the eye of the beholder « Motho ke motho ka botho

Bloat is in the eye of the beholder « Motho ke motho ka botho — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 12:30:14 +0000

[...] say software bloat is bad and that you should avoid bloated desktops or inefficient operating systems is simply one [...]

By: Nythain

Nythain — Sat, 15 May 2010 23:41:04 +0000

How well does this install handle sound devices and hal related things like display settings? I used to build my ubuntu systems from cli but as the releases keep on releasing, i find it trickier and trickier to get a full functional lightweight desktop

By: Walter

Walter — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 09:24:42 +0000

Secdroid,
no worries: I have not given up on openbox yet.
Thing is: I am quite demanding of my desktop when I use it: normally I have many apps open at the same time (Thunderbird, Firefox, Calc, Write, Pidgin, likely Rythmbox/VLC, a torrent client and maybe even Gimp): I rely on ‘something’ that lets me switch apps quickly and also lets me kepe track of what’s open and where, so the ‘plain vanilla’ openbox did not cut it for me, which is why I looked into docks.
LXDE is certainly an option: I’ll have a look at it.
I’m no Linux expert, so I’ll probably need something as simple as the guide in this post to get it to work
Thanks again for the suggestion.

By: secdroid

secdroid — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 12:55:47 +0000

Walter, may I suggest something else before you give up on Openbox?

Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE) is based on Openbox but has the sort of built-in features that make it instantly understandable to Gnome, KDE, and XFCE users. It is a great way to get started with Openbox and you can easily add and remove features at will. (LXDE is modular, allowing mix-and-match application selection, should you desire.)

The main LXDE wiki page has (at bottom) “How to install LXDE with different Linux distributions” that covers the most popular distros. See http://wiki.lxde.org/en/Main_Page

Antother helpful wiki page (even if you use another distro) is http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/LXDE

A good LXDE overview article can be found at http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/3866591/LXDE-Smaller-Faster-than-KDE-or-GNOME.htm

I use it and like it. It has allowed me to get comfortable with Openbox and start to change out some of the other LXDE apps to give me a more personalized Openbox experience.

By: Walter

Walter — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 12:41:29 +0000

Hello there,
wonderful tutorial. I loved to go through these steps and “build” my first own system (well, not exactly “mine” I guess, but closest that had ever been). Indeed, very easy.
I have a couple of questions though, if I can ask:
1) Installing openbox does not bring any “bar” (a-la-gnome) nor docking. It would be a nice add on for me so that I could make some menus for quick-launching apps and to go through the open apps. What do you suggest (other than installing gnome-core I guess)
2) About the docking: I tried to install awn and cairo. I managed to install ‘some’ packages, but I really have no way to know which package do I need to install to get an app up and running (for example, for openbox you indicated to install “openbox”, “obconf” and “obmenu”).
3) Say I don’t like openbox: should I uninstall it before installing gnome-core?
4) Last but not least: in most of your previous posts you showed us console setups with “video against the framebuffer”: if I was to try and do that, what should I do?

Regardless of the answers, thank you again so much for the tutorial.
Walter

By: Its beauty is in its potential « Motho ke motho ka botho

Its beauty is in its potential « Motho ke motho ka botho — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 00:50:25 +0000

[...] down Ubuntu’s Gnome — or even better, strip it out completely — the underlying skeleton is actually quite efficient. Not lightning-fast, but at least [...]

By: Build a lighter Gnome in Ubuntu « Motho ke motho ka botho

Build a lighter Gnome in Ubuntu « Motho ke motho ka botho — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:00:02 +0000

[...] Projects « Build a lightweight graphical system in Ubuntu [...]

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 22:11:47 +0000

Good point. I mentally had that lumped in with audio players, but it is worth mentioning that alsa-utils is probably useful, and that the channels are still muted at startup. Thanks.