mdev and Xvesa for ultralight systems

6 Replies

If you remember Blice of the Ubuntu Forums as the author of fttps, the command-line download manager, you might be interested in keeping an eye on his notes at its.alrig.ht.

These days he’s been carving away at system start times and overall system requirements by relying on mdev instead of udev, and building Xvesa independent of the full X arsenal.

The net effect, to hear him describe it, is quite exciting. Those changes, coupled with some hard-wiring of the system startup (mostly compiling the startup scripts, if I understand it correctly), is resulting in some extremely lightweight systems that boot in single-digit start times with memory profiles under 16Mb. And those are Openbox-plus systems, not my ultra-slim Awesome systems.

If you’re the owner of an old machine (sigh … or a netbook owner, I guess 🙄 ) you might want to take a closer look. Most of it sounds no more difficult than compiling a few programs and building a few scripts, and I can vouch for his helpfulness if you run into a problem.

And think how much you could do by relying only on Xvesa, instead of all of X? It would almost be like a personal version of SliTaz. Hmm. This makes me want to get out the Pentium again. … 😐

6 thoughts on “mdev and Xvesa for ultralight systems”

  1. Mike

    This sounds interesting, unfortunately I can’t use Xvesa as I use Catalyst, but replacing udev with mdev sounds like a good idea. I’ll try it and see what happens.

    Reply ↓
  3. Blice

    @Mike

    When you follow the compile instructions I gave, it doesn’t just give you Xvesa. I should have mentioned that.

    You get:

    Xati
    Xpm2
    Xvesa
    Xepson
    Xr128
    Xmga
    Xnvidia
    Xfbdev
    Xephyr
    Xi810
    Xfake
    Xmach64
    Xchips
    Xvia
    Xneomagic

    And finally, Xsmi.

    These are all lightweight X servers with specific drivers built in (As specified by the binary’s name..)

    So you might want to give Xati a try :]

    Reply ↓
    1. Blice

      My dreamhost account was cancelled rather abruptly and I lost just about everything- Except for a couple of choice blog entries. I’m in the process of remaking my website. You can get to the mdev article here: http://alrig.ht/blog/2.html It’s poorly written and I plan on rewriting it before I launch my new website, but I hope its some help to you anyway. If you have any questions you can e-mail me at lifes@alrig.ht

      Reply ↓

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