kde/128M (was: oneline article: "Debian Alliance on The Horizon")

[Michael Shigorin]

On Mon, Aug 15, 2005 at 11:34:24AM -0400, Ed Cogburn wrote:
> > Warty to Hoary. Possibly, installing KDE in the middle
> > confounded things, but I think it _should_ have worked.
> Trust me, when you're doing a dist-upgrade, *nothing* is assured.  :)

OTOH doing update; install $things; dist-upgrade *is* going to
complicate things (and confuse poor apt even more) if it's not
due to the very basic things needing an upgrade in the first
place (with apt-rpm, that would be glibc, rpm, apt + libs).

> What concerns me is they aren't stopping at all.

Well you know those who have -- fvwm and friends.  Folks annoyed
with 'news of the world' tend to camp there these days. :)

> > OTOH I used to use RHL 7.3 (KDE 2.2 I think) on a 128 Mb
> > Pentium II and it was better than FC3 on a 1.3 Ghz Celeron
> > with 256.

I've been using ALT's KDE3.x (seems like 3.2) a year ago on
P233MMX/128M.  After some tweaking (removing main menu side
picture was one of the less obvious but strangely helping things)
it got quite snappy, although it was a minute experiment and 
I wasn't really spending time to check simultaneous e.g. OOo
performance [it used to work on K5/48M in build 63x days...].

Last Monday, we've been running icewm+mozilla+openoffice on
a customer's Cel633/128M.  After getting things loaded (tens of
seconds but not really *that* slow) I'd even work with it.

> Ahh, the good ol'e days!  And you could have both GNOME and KDE
> installed without them using 200MB of hard space, now they
> *each* take up more than 200MB or so, counting dependencies.

Heh.  These days package information takes enough place to fit
some '97 distro within it :)

KDE 1.1.2 was quite OK on 32M, and folks tell that 1.0b used to
work on 16M systems (that broke with 1.0).  I wasn't playing KDE
builds back then though. :) (as well as now)

> That SimpleKDE thing isn't what I thought it was.  Its based on
> KDE 3.4, but I'm wondering if we really should go back to 3.1
> or 3.2 (2.x?) before featuritis hit with such a vengence and
> create a stripped-down KDE-Lite or something.

Still 3.4 was significantly faster, comparing an upgrade from 3.2
or 3.3.  I didn't look into the subject matter but everyone using
it did notice.

-- 
 ---- WBR, Michael Shigorin <mike at altlinux.ru>
  ------ Linux.Kiev http://www.linux.kiev.ua/