Non-PAE kernel in 12.10

[Liam Proven]

On 25 February 2013 22:09, Ric Moore <wayward4now at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> So, do you recommend installing Windowmaker first, then
> removing everything else? Hopefully it won't go boom as the install took
> forever brutishly installing/upgrading as I did. Thanks for any pointers.

Well, you could do. I am fiddling around in a VM as I write,
experimentally trying to build a Window Maker/GNUstep only install of
Quantal.

I think it would be a very interesting exercise to build an Ubuntu
GNUstep Remix. I don't have the skills & don't really know where to
start, though.

But all the bits you need for a whole remix are in there in the repos
already. No porting etc. needed.. Text editors, email client, FTP,
media players, image viewers, monitoring apps - all with the NeXTstep
look & feel.

OK, true, some elements are missing. There is no web browser, but then
again, there's Firefox and Chromium and whatnot. They don't fit the
"look" but they are there and they work. And there's no office suite,
but again, there's LibreOffice.

I've only found 2 problems.

#1 There is or was a Window Maker file manager, called FSViewer.
Oddly, its icons are in a package in the Debian/Ubuntu repositories,
but the app is not. You can download the .deb from Debian.org and it
works fine but it's been pulled for some reason.

#2 GNUstep has a file manager as part of the GWorkspace.app program.
But GWorkspace is strange. It completely takes over your desktop: it
draws its own, more Mac OS X-like Dock, /as well as/ the Window Maker
dock. It replaces the Window Maker wallpaper with its own. It hides
the WindowMaker app menu and window menu.

Now, that's all OK insofar as it goes. But, I can't find how to add
things to GWorkspace's Dock, it makes it hard to open your own apps
and so on, it requires special reconfiguration of WindowMaker to hide
its Dock... and worst of all, although the GNUstep pages claim it's
stable:

http://www.gnustep.it/enrico/gworkspace/

I quote: "Currently GWorkspace is a very stable application and can be
used as your file manager for daily usage."

However, this simply isn't true. It's very flakey and crashes all the
time on me. It is unusably unstable - and if you use it as your
desktop, when it dies, it takes the other GNUstep apps with it.

So I have left it aside for now and built a desktop with just GNUstep
apps where I can. The result looks, to my jaded old eyes, lovely - I
always did love NeXTstep, I think it's *the* best-looking desktop GUI
there ever has been. And the apps, while a bit weird, all seem to work
and the look and feel is consistent - once you got used to it, you
would know what to expect and so on.

AFAIK there is no WindowMaker/GNUstep Linux distro and never has been,
except for some demo liveCDs - WindowMaker Live and GNUstep Live.
Given that there is a nearly-complete desktop environment here, it is
crying out to be done.

Anyone feel like joining me & making it happen?

> It IS a shame that older functional iron gets left in the dirt. It seems
> like any gains I make in improving hardware becomes diminished by software
> demands. IMHO! it would be better to have "slim and mean" installed first,
> and if you want to pile a bunch of daemons and other cpu wasting junk on,
> thus making your install less responsive, then you have only yourself to
> blame.

There is Lubuntu. There /was/ U-Lite but it sort of died. I was
peripherally involved with that. There was RULE but that died too.

Today, there is NotaLinux with Maté, and Vector Linux which is still
quite light... And there is the roll-your-own route.


> Having an initial install that looks like a pinball machine, full of
> flashy-thingies and beeps, discourages those who the Ubuntu ethic was to be
> applied to ...the less fortunate users with minimal hardware.

I agree. Ubuntu is still slimmer and more elegant than many - e.g.
SUSE or the terrible Ultimate Ubuntu Edition, with 26 of every type of
app thrown in. A 14YO's idea of "uiltimate", which means MUST INCLUDE
ALL THE THINGS!!!!11!1!!1

There is room at the bottom. But Linux progressively drops support for
older, slower hardware. If you want a really lightweight OS, Linux is
not it.

--
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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