Switching from Gnome to Fluxbox..

Marth · n00b Joined: 22 Apr 2004 Posts: 6

First off, I'm so happy I finally got Gentoo running.

I've been trying to find a linux distro that I really like for so long, and now I've certainly found it!

Anyhow, on to the question. Emerged gnome a few days ago - what a waste of time IMHO, very bloated. Now I've decided to switch to fluxbox, as I've tried it, and it's really slick and fast, which I like. Now, my questions are:

1. Even though I'll be using things such as gdesklets and whatnot, is it safe to emerge -C gnome? I was running 2.6.

2. In the same way, is it safe to put stuff like "-gnome -gtk" and those sorts of things in my USE flags now?

3. Finally...is it common for gdesklets to hog so much RAM? This laptop of mine has 128MB, and a 512MB swap partition, and after getting gdesklets up with 7 desklets going, it's already used at least 75% of the ram according to the meminfo desklet.

Thanks very much, as I said, so far I'm totally loving fluxbox. Hopefully everything will be working correctly one of these days.

barlad · l33t Joined: 22 Feb 2003 Posts: 673

1. I would say no. gdesklets and a lot of other programs made for gnome use some gnome libraries. Doing "emerge -C gnome" will probably remove those librairies and your programs will not work anymore.
I guess one way to do it would be to remove gnome then re emerge the programs that do not work along with the dependencies it requires (that way, you don't get the whole gnome package).

2. Yes and no. I would not put "-gtk" because many applications use GTK as their graphical toolkit. Wether you use gnome or fluxbox does not matter to them. If you put "-gtk", odds are that you will get the command line version of some apps while you might rather have the graphical interface. I guess "-gnome" is safe, but you never know with all those ebuilds.
Personally, I have both gtk and gnome in my USE flags and when I see that a package needs the whole gnome stuff, I just emerge it with USE="-gnome".

3. I can't tell you. Are you sure those 75% of RAM are not mostly cached and buffered RAM?

Btw, welcome to Fluxbox. I just switched from Kahakai to Flux and well... I love it.

scout · Posted: Fri Apr 23, 2004 10:17 am Post subject:

Marth · n00b Joined: 22 Apr 2004 Posts: 6

Okay, well, I've decided I can live without gdesklets here. They're a little too heavy in CPU and RAM usage for this cruddy little laptop. So...now I'm thinking. I found a script here:

GenKreton · Posted: Sat Apr 24, 2004 3:40 am Post subject:

If you use that script you should probably 'revdep-rebuild all', just to make sure nothing is broken. A great little not-so-well-known tool.

dkaplowitz · Posted: Sat Apr 24, 2004 3:56 am Post subject:

BTW, you probably already know this, but a nice alternative to the gdesklets that runs with a lot smaller footprint is gkrellm. It gives you a lot of the same functionality in a small area. I think it looks cool on wms like fluxbox or WindowMaker.
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joem · Posted: Sat Apr 24, 2004 7:35 am Post subject:

I would second gkrellm. Gdesklets eat up large amounts of ram, and aren't very useful most of the time. If you need something to monitor mail/system usage, go with gkrellm. Doesn't matter if you use gnome/fluxbox..things will seem slow and bloated if you have a group of desklets running.

darkarchon · Posted: Thu May 06, 2004 7:33 pm Post subject:

just make sure to run gkrellm2 when you kick it off from the command line. gkrellm brings up the older version and some things are not in there (i.e. the disk monitor).
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revertex · l33t Joined: 23 Apr 2003 Posts: 806

Dockapps is another nice alternative to gdesklets.

http://dockapps.org

niffs · Posted: Fri May 07, 2004 1:18 am Post subject:

Nice choice! i used to use Gnome too, (On redhat) but then switched to blackbox (On FreeBSD), then to Fluxbox (On Gentoo), and now pekwm (On Gentoo). Id say fluxbox was very good.

1. If you really want gdesklets, you can probabbly unmerge gnome itself, but not the deps (dependencies). I would recomment gkrellm over gdesklets too. gnome stufs create lots of annoying config files and take up space.

2. Keep GTK, it is not gnome, GTK is only something used by it.

3. gdesklets probabbly do take up lots of ram, but I dont use them, so I wouldnt know.

By the way, pekwm is just like fluxbox, but more original and has pixmap themes and complex configuration.