Ok, I lied to you a little bit earlier. I thought that there
would be only a few things that you have to do to get Red Hat working properly, but
it turns out there’s more than a few. And I was way wrong about
gnome-terminal. Let me try again; I’ve got an old Transmonde Vibrant,
a P2/266 laptop with 64MB RAM, a 4Gb hard drive and a nice big, crisp
screen. And, thanks again Rob, I’ve got Red Hat 9. This should be cool,
but it turns out that it’s only sort-of. Out of the box, even
with all the services shut down, it’s onerously slow. That can
be fixed, with a little effort.
- I say again, get yourself EvilWM. At 23k (k!) it’s got a
horsepower-to-weight ratio that beats the tar out of the 2.8 megabyte
Metacity, even if installing in front of gdm is a pain in the ass for
novices such as myself. Lucky for me I’ve got absolutely nothing better
to do with my time than sifting through a snake pit of configuration
files and shell scripts, no sirree. - I got me some rxvt, a thinned-down
xterm replacement. On the assumption that the performance problems had
something to do with the furious disk thrashing that, another assumption,
were mostly about VM and page swapping, I took a look at the situation
with “top”. Now, I realize I’m a noob and I don’t know nothin’ about
nothin’, but I think that eight to ten megabytes of my precious, scarce
memory for a freaking terminal window might be a just a tiny
bit on the excessive side. - I have to work with Java,
and some brief Googlage sent me to the good folks at
Blackdown.org. Getting some
docs is all good, too. This doesn’t have much to do with performance,
but, well, hey. - Get Mozilla. Really,
it doesn’t matter what you’re running. Latest, greatest, go get it. - The
XMMS MP3 thingy, obviously.
That’s what I’ve got for now. I suspect that it amounts to installing
Gnome and then not running it. It’s nice that I’ve got Gnome around,
I guess, but wow, is it ever slow. I suspect that’s because
it’s incredibly bloated, but maybe I’ve just applied the wrong theme
or something.
The other thing that I’ve got to do is figure out how to rebuild the
now-irreplaceable battery. This laptop, swoon, actually has a battery
that’s screwed together, so that civilized people with soldering tools
can open it up and peer at the contents. This might even mean that can
replace the innards at some reasonable price. Here’s hoping.