OT: Windows is too expensive

[parabolize]

1. Not only does WINE not need a windows partition I wouldn't recommend using one. Make sure WINE runs the applications you want though.

2. Yeah, Xfce4 will work fine. IceWM is a OK if old window manager but isn't a full desktop environment.

[Baron Munchausen]

What a day... it took a good five hours for SUSE 10.2 to install on the spare box. I sure hope that's because it's an older system (socket 7 MB with a K6-2) and doesn't indicate how long it will take on my main system. And even when I got it installed I had to putter around to figure out why it couldn't recognize the modem (forgot to disable the integrated com ports when putting the card in the machine) and then had to install kinternet manually because it wasn't installed initially.

In other news, there is apparently a bug in this kernel that prevents dialup from working. Connects fine, but then when I start to download something it always disconnects. I've Googled the log messages, and it seems there is a kernel bug that makes it barf on PPP compression. I need to figure out how to disable 'deflate' compression in the ppp daemon. Until I can figure out how and where to set the 'nodeflate' command for the ppp daemon, the box can't connect and get the updated kernel.

P.S. "APT" is not present in the SUSE 10.2 install. Guess I'll have to get it from the repository when I figure out the connection bug.

[Baron Munchausen]

Well, at least I found where to set the 'nodeflate' option and now my SUSE box can connect to the ISP and actually do something. Weirdly, there are no patches available even though 10.2 is more than six months old. Haven't there been quite a few iterations of the kernel by now?

APT is not available. XFce is not available. Both will have to be acquired from a 'third party' I guess. I expected to have to download Seamonkey directly. It's not 'official' anymore, but if XFce is not part of the SUSE package system, it might be a bit of a problem to maintain properly in the long run. ICEwm is there, however.

If I wanted to switch to ICEwm, how would I do that?

Also, if I wanted to try to shrink KDE a bit, where is there a guide to various things that can be disabled to make KDE less of a resource hog? I've reduced the fancy widgets in desktop settings, but there are probably a lot of other options that I won't figure out for some time. A guide to pruning/slimming KDE would be very useful.

[Fyron]

You'd install IceWM, and it should appear as a choice in KDM at login automatically (via proper configuration changes made by the package installer).

[Baron Munchausen]

Well, I had set 'automatic login' during setup so I didn't know it was possible to choose session type at login.

Anyway, after turning off automatic login I tried ICEwm and found it rather pathetic. A klunky interface was not what I wanted. (Maybe there is a way to configure it better?) A less burdensome window manager was what I wanted. What I'd like to do is reduce the system load of KDE. FVWM seems to be the main cause of KDE bloat. Is it possible to make KDE use a different window manager like ICEwm or WindowMaker? Or would these not support the functions that FVWM does?

Weirdly, though, many programs which were not listed in the KDE menus are listed in the ICEwm menus. Now why would a program be installed and not listed in the menus?

Also, how do I go about installing a manufacturer's video driver? The default driver for my Matrox video card doesn't support 3D functions. I have the Matrox driver(s) in a .tar archive but don't know how I'd install them.

And one other annoyance, my CD drive is constantly blinking! I remember this from Windows. There is some sort of autodetect that checks for a disk every few seconds. I was able to turn it off in Windows but haven't figured out how to turn it off in SUSE Linux yet. There must be a setting somewhere, just like in Windows?

Also, I found that I cannot uninstall Firefox despite it's being a supposed 'third party' application. When I try I get a bunch of dependency warning about X11 -- So apparently I'd damage or disable X11 by removing it. This smacks of Microsoft tactics. Why would they put something essential to the windowing system into an application library?

[Fyron]

Less burdensome? Try openbox.

KDE and Gnome are not window managers themselves; they contain a window manager (metacity for Gnome, and I forget what KDE uses). You can replace it, but I forget how. Google knows. Openbox might be a nice solution to try.

"Weirdly, though, many programs which were not listed in the KDE menus are listed in the ICEwm menus. Now why would a program be installed and not listed in the menus?"

Because it isn't Windows or Mac OS X, and each DE and WM has its own menu system. Some of them try to share some info with each other, but they all maintain separate lists.

"Also, I found that I cannot uninstall Firefox despite it's being a supposed 'third party' application. When I try I get a bunch of dependency warning about X11 -- So apparently I'd damage or disable X11 by removing it. This smacks of Microsoft tactics. Why would they put something essential to the windowing system into an application library?"

They don't, and you can successfully remove FF without damaging X11 (X11 and Gecko have nothing to do with each other, unlike IE and Explorer's window managing bits). The most likely explanation is that the package manager is erroneously detecting some X-related libraries as no longer being dependencies of anything, and thus marking them as safe for removal. Its most likely a bug/configuration error in the package manager.

[Baron Munchausen]

There is an option under Yast -> System -> System settings to set the 'default window manager' but I'm not sure if that would keep the KDE desktop on top of the new manager or just switch to a different environment... like Windowmaker.

Now there is a cool desktop. I really like the 'look and feel' and it's noticably quicker and smoother than KDE. The problem is, it doesn't have a 'taskbar' like KDE or ICEwm and I can't figure out how to manage the applets that are normally parked in the tray. Starting any app creates a 'box' on the desktop, but then what? Right-clicking doesn't bring up the menu like it does in KDE. How do you make Kinternet dialout if you can get the context menu? So I can't figure out how to activate them.

And it looks like the "beagle" desktop search utility is dependent on Firefox so I can't remove it until I find a different desktop search program. It's very useful to be able to do brute force searches for things in those zillions of directories that *ix systems use.

[Fyron]

If its within KDE's config apps, I would assume it applies to the window manager KDE uses. You can always set it back if it isn't, right?

You can do brute force searches with the "find" utility...