Rolling Again

[worker201]

In a fit of crazy, I wiped Windows from my ThinkPad and installed the KDE spin of Fedora 12.  It's been a long time since I've used Linux on a regular basis, and this is my first time using KDE in over 10 years.  So things should be interesting.  My first goal is to get all my development stuff installed, so we'll see how that goes.  First impression - Konqueror is not very pretty.

I'll be making more posts to this thread as I discover fun in Linux.

[Aloone_Jonez]

What spec' is the ThinkPad?

I had one in the early 90s, it was a 486 with 8MB RAM. I got it second hand ans the battery was fucked. I've not owned a laptop for years, the last was a P166 with 32MB of RAM and a 800x600 display which could only do 16-bit high colour. I still have it but the battery is now fucked and there's a couple of lines missing from the display.

I like Fedora, much better than Red Hat 9.

I've not tried KDE recently, I've always gone with XFCE.

I still have an install on my hard drive when I was using an old machine with 256MB RAM so KDE wasn't really an option. Now I have 1GB, maybe when I upgrade to x64 Fedora I'll give KDE ago.

I'll do that after I've installed the new Raptor hard drive which I'm waiting to get a SATA cable for.

[worker201]

Specs on the Thinkpad:
1.66 GHz Core Duo Yonah T5500
2 GB RAM
Intel 945GM (chosen specifically for Linux compatibility when I first bought the computer years ago)
2 GB 7200 rpm HD
no battery available

The last Fedore I installed was 8, back when I was working at the university.  So far, it's been interesting.  I'm finding that KDE is very different than Gnome.  But it does look nice.  Package installation has been smooth so far - which is good because there's a lot of work to do.  I've got PostgreSQL, PHP, Pear, PostGIS and Firefox installed so far.  Still a long ways to go.

We've talked a lot about how Linux includes a lot of stuff out of the box, which Windows doesn't have.  I'm finding that's just not the case anymore.  If you install Linux from a live CD, it's pretty sparse.  Takes a good afternoon with the package program just to get things moving.  However, the fact that you can get pretty much anything, including a whole new GUI, from the package program is pretty useful.  With Windows, you have to sit there with your CDs and product keys, and obviously this way is much simpler.

[Lead Head]

 Hows the overall responsiveness of the system?

[worker201]

Very slow.  KDE seems to have a lot of graphical overhead.  At any given time, I only have a couple hundred MB RAM available.  Perhaps the memory usage needs to be modified?

[Aloone_Jonez]

2 GB 7200 rpm HD

Don't you mean 200GB?

I think it must be KDE. I've run Fedora 11 with 256MB of RAM and it wasn't that bad.

I've heard that it's normal for Linux to swallow as much free memory as possible to use for things such as disk buffers, if more memory is required, the buffer size is reduced.

[worker201]

Sorry, 200GB hard drive.

If one wanted to adjust the amount of memory used, how would one do that?  Anybody?

I'm viewing this right now in KDE Firefox, and it is nice looking.  I guess this computer is driving the graphics a little harder than I normally do on my Mac - everything is smaller and clearer.

But I have to use a mouse with this computer - the trackpad sucks.  Or, rather, the trackpad on the Mac is the best ever, and nobody else can come close.

[Lead Head]

The trackpad on my friends MacBook Pro drove me insane. Hated it. Actually most trackpads drive me insane, terrible things. Give me a good mouse any day.

Does Fedora let you install multiple window managers? Would be interesting to compare Gnome and KDE performance back to back.

[piratePenguin]

you dont need to run a benchmark to know gnome runs much smoother than kde. kde does drive things harder on the graphics end and is more modern.

btw, gnome 2.3 is coming out in 6 or so months, its got a pretty interesting new shell. it'll be interesting to see if the footprint gets bigger, as thats always been a priority for them ( i dont mean the footprint in their logo!)

[Aloone_Jonez]

No, I don't know how to alter the memory location settings.

Yes, Fedora easily allows installing multiple WMs, just use yum.

[worker201]

Got Flash and Adobe Reader running.  Irks me to no end that they can't figure out some way to add those to the package manager.

One thing that is kinda driving me crazy - the internet is too slow.  It's a wired connection, running off the same router and DSL modem as the Mac, but the performance is just crawling.  Once it gets a page, it renders it pretty quick, but it seems like there is some sort of irritating delay while it thinks about your clicks.  The absolute worst is trying to use some sort of Ajax interface, like Mafia Wars or Facebook or Google Maps - takes for-fucking-ever.  Any thoughts?

[Lead Head]

Is that with Firefox or Konq?

[worker201]

Firefox.  I didn't like Konqueror at all.  Firefox version is 3.5.9.

[worker201]

Disabling IPv6 in Firefox seems to have fixed my internet speed issues.  Supposedly there's a way to do it at the OS level to fix it for Konqueror as well, but I haven't found that yet.

[worker201]

One of the fun things about Linux is that if you don't know what you're doing, you can really fuck things up.  I managed to accidentally disembowel KDE last night.  I was setting up PostgreSQL, and created the user postgres.  Somehow, this user came with a password, which I didn't know, so I couldn't switch to that user or authenticate its tasks.  I somehow decided that the best thing to do would be to delete the user and add it again, this time by passing the arguments to set the password myself.  And since that user owned all the pgsql processes, I decided to remove all its packages and just start over with a fresh install.  For some reason, though, the package manager decided to also uninstall all the dependencies for those packages - including a bunch of KDE system files.  The package manager itself was even damaged during this episode.  And konsole was gone, so there was no hope of rebuilding.  I had to break out the install CD and start from scratch.

Well, that was fun.  Fortunately, I didn't have any critical data on there at all.