[nycbug-talk] Minimum Install w/ X11 on Virtual PC

George R. george
Thu Jul 7 20:48:31 EDT 2005


Scott Robbins wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> On Thu, Jul 07, 2005 at 02:40:09PM -0400, Hakim Singhji wrote:
> 
>>Hi All,
>>
>>I am going to install FreeBSD 5.4 on MS Virtual PC. My PC (IBM
>>Thinkpad R51) only has 256MB of RAM available. I do not want to
>>install Gnome or KDE however I would like the benefits of colors in
>>text editors, backgrounds, etc. as this is going to be a testing
>>environment for application development.
>>
>>What is the best way to go about doing this? In VPC I allot
>>approximately 96MB of RAM for the Virtual Machine and I was thinking
>>256MB for virtual SWAP (would that even help... the default is like
>>166MB for 96MB of RAM... or something like that.
> 
> 
> If I understand your question, you'd like a window manager that is
> pretty light but has the ability to do backgrounds and the like.  
> Both rxvt and aterm are lightweight xterms that can show backgrounds as
> they run--there is also eterm, but it's more resource intensive.  
> 
> As for the window manager itself, I like fluxbox, and it's considered
> relatively light.  There is weewm, which can have a background
> image--actually, I think most of them can now, using xsetbg.  Fluxbox
> has fbsetbg which will set a background, but does require some other
> program to do that--some people use feh, xv and xli are two other
> programs that can work with fbsetbg to set your background.
> 
> I hope I've understood that aspect of your question.  If not, apologies
> for wasting your time.

I'm not sure what you asking specifically either, but as Scott says, 
there are plenty of lightweight window managers to use. . . XFCE/XFCE4 
can be pretty too.

I have XFCE4 running very nicely with 64 meg of RAM on a iMAC with OBSD 3.6.

But the real reason I'm posting is that it's a bad idea to cross-post, 
as you did with freebsd questions.  Etiquette-wise it's ugly; and in 
terms of discussoin coherency and continuity.

g




More information about the talk mailing list