StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Not having school this week, I decided to mess around with my laptop once again, it being my test machine. While I was at first enamored with RedHat 8/9's Bluecurve setup, allowing for a close-to-seamless GNOME and KDE integration, the whole thing was rather bloated. Hideously so.

Enough is enough, I thought, so I nuked that install save for my /home partition. I then went and grabbed Gentoo Linux 1.4 (recently released) and installed from Stage 3 (if you think I'm going to compile glibc, gcc and binutils, you're nuts). I got things quickly running, including framebuffered console and other goodness, plus XFree86 + Icewm.

I then contemplated whether to use GNOME or KDE (neither really satifactory) when I discovered XFce - a rather lightweight GNOME-compliant desktop. Some compiles later, I started it and find it much more responsive than either of the two big desktop enviornments.

Then I went to compile Ximian Evolution and went to sleep. Come morning, everything works. Yay.

Anyways, I like Gentoo Linux 1.4, but it takes a lot of time to set up.

Compiling glibc, binutils, etc isn't that bad. I tried ALFS (had to edit scripts to use one partition, due to space limitations) and it worked, the problem was that it was annoying to have to manually download and compile everything, and shoehorn it into 1GB. glibc and gcc both took one day to compile on a P120 (might have been two though).

Got tired of it, so running Debian. Too lazy to switch to gentoo.

I hate lightweight desktops.

Oh, and for a cross toolkit theme, check out Qtcurve. It's KDE oriented though- eg it picks out colors from KDE.

XFce 4 is lightweight, but it's an actual DE as opposed to being a mere window manager. It also looks decent out-of-the-box and doesn't need huge amounts of customization.

I also tried out XDirectFB, but it doesn't really like my laptop very much.

Sucks that 3D accelerated DFB won't work without DRI, which nVidia does not support, and open source versions cannot be made due to lack of documentation. . KPovmodeler is jerky.