LowEndSystemSupport

Revision 7 as of 2005-10-17 20:46:24

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Installing XFCE

Some systems with lower memory configurations will be more responsive without the extra eye candy provided by the Gnome interface. To install XFCE, a lightweight alternative to Gnome:

  • Make sure the Universe repository is enabled (see AddingRepositoriesHowto)

  • Install the package xfce4 or xubuntu-desktop if using Breezy (see SynapticHowto)

  • Once all the packages are successfully installed you may log out (you don't need to restart your computer for these changes to take effect, isn't that neat?)

  • Select xfce from the Session option on the log in screen.

Enjoy your snappy new desktop interface! You can always choose Gnome again later through the Session option if you get a memory upgrade or decide you don't mind the boggy interface.

Enabling automount

One of the useful features that running Gnome provides is the 'auto-magical' mounting of removable media, like CD's and USB drives. However, you can very easily have this feature whilst you use the superb XFCE4 Desktop Environment.

  • Open a terminal window and run 'gnome-volume-manager&'. This will start gnome-volume-manager and run it in the background.

  • Next time you quit XFCE4, select 'Save session for future logins'. This will ensure that gnome-volme-manager starts each time you start xfce.

  • Now plugin your favourite USB drive or CDRom and find it magically mounted in /media/xxxxx.

Note, that this won't bring up an icon onto your desktop as it would in Gnome as XFCE doesn't have support for desktop icons. However nice things, like the automatic importing of photos from memory cards and playing of audio CDs does occur.

Speeding up Firefox

  • The 'adblock' extension can make browsing particularly slow. You might have better results using a seperate proxy server like Privoxy instead (available in the repositories)

Using the official mozilla.org build

You can try using the mozilla.org build of firefox instead of Ubuntu's version. For some reason, it is significantly faster. The disadvantage is you will no longer get automatic updates through the repositories (but firefox itself has a built into auto-updater).

These instructions lead you through installing Firefox 1.5 beta 2, but should also work for 1.0.7 or any other version.

  • First, back up your bookmarks and settings - you'll need to remove ~/.mozilla once the new version is installed. The bookmarks file is ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/bookmarks.html
  • Download firefox-1.5b2.tar.gz from mozilla.org
  • Install it to /opt/firefox: 
     sudo cp firefox-1.5b2.tar.gz /opt/
 cd /opt
 sudo tar xzvf firefox-1.5b2.tar.gz
 sudo rm firefox-1.5b2.tar.gz
  • Rename your old profile: 
     cd
 mv .mozilla .mozilla.ubuntu
  • To ensure it is used as the default version, modify the symbolic link in /usr/bin: 
     sudo dpkg-divert --divert /usr/bin/firefox.ubuntu --rename /usr/bin/firefox
 sudo ln -s /opt/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox
  • Try it out: 
     firefox

For an even more bare-bones install, see http://www.binonabiso.com/en/Ubuntu-miniRAM-HOWTO.html

More information: ["Installation/LowMemorySystems"]