invention

Did some work at the Jubilee Linux lab (5 old slow computers each with their own version of Fedora - 4 at the moment because one of the power supplies has died...)

upgraded to xfce-4.1.90

This is the latest version of xfce (the lightweight desktop environment we use). It's supposed to be a beta, but for the use at the lab it should be perfectly stable (I've been using it at home to test). The main reason for this is the kiosk mode (next item) The other things the latest version does that was a major missing element in xfce 4.0 is you can have a start menu on the panel (similar to windows). I haven't enabled this at the moment as people are only using a few apps

set up kiosk mode

This version of xfce has what is called "kiosk" mode which enables the administrator to set up what settings users are allowed to change (panel icons, desktop settings, etc). I have set this up so the normal user can't change anything, and set up some default options so it should work exactly as wanted. Note that it does make it slightly difficult to actually change the settings if you want to override it.

set up the default panel

I have set up the panel to contain a link to terminal (which most people won't use), openoffice.org, mozilla, help, log out, and the time. I have also moved the workspace switcher from the panel (at the bottom) to the taskbar (at the top)

cleanup

We had very little free space on some of the machines (20MB!!!) so I did some clean up of packages we don't use. - removed Omni printing libraries (57MB) - removed OpenOffice.org i18n libs (250MB) (fedora installs all the languages avaailable by default!)

Looking nice now...

What advice would you offer to someone who is contemplating starting a GPL-based business?

Fran�ois Bancilhon: Where do I start? (laughs) First, clearly define a solid type of business model for the type of product or service you want to provide. Secondly, one pitfall people make is that they can use a service business model to propel a product. If you create a product, then a product-geared business model is needed, and if you sell services then a service model is needed.

OK, I am working my way through window managers, desktops etc ... currently xfce is the winner... I could personally use some of the blackbox or fvwm-style options but I think many newbie users would get confused. rox is interesting but wierd ... At least xfce gives me a basic usable panel, nice window manager, etc...

What I want now is an integrated tasklist in the panel instead of a separate window... seems that this can be done in the development version, 4.2 - nice screenshot also shows a nice start menu etc. I want it to be simple to install and maintain which currently means Fedora packages (I might compile xfce 4.2 myself just to look at though). newrpms is a good repository for xfce packages that includes a few of the available plugins, but not the taskbar plugin for the panel :-(

Seems like I am not alone in feeling frustrated with current Linux desktop bloat when running on older machines. An article from Bob Marr that was featured on slashdot says basically the same thing.

Anyway the point of this is there are a number of suggestions from the Slashdot story to look into... In approximate order of popularity (and ignoring commercial distributions that you can't download for free):

• xfce (desktop environment)
• fluxbox (window manager)
• fvwm (window manager)
• rox (desktop environment)
• sawfish (window manager)
• windowmaker (window manager)
• blackbox (window manager)
• icewm (window manager)
• pekwm (window manager)
• enlightenment (window manager plus)
• idesk (icons on the desktop)

Most of these are just window managers, some are full desktop tools. Anyway I intend to try some to see how they fare ... no point in having a system so slow as to be practically unusable. Some seemed to suggest that using konqueror without the rest of KDE, and one of the above would work well. A review of Linux desktops has a good list of resource requirements for fluxbox, xfce, KDE, Gnome. Another idea would be using kdrive instead of a full X server...

On a related note, read this interview with the CEO of Centaur about creating not-so-fast not-so-power-hungry not-so-expensive x86 processors for VIA. Good stuff - would be great to see more of these being used in South Africa.