[Rule] Is Gnome/KDE the greatest bloat?

[Richard Kweskin]

On Wed, 29 Aug 2007 10:14:07 +0200
Ingo Lantschner <ingo.lists at vum.at> wrote:

> hmh, Xubuntu has both X, a windowmanager and a Desktop (Xfce). You  
> can drag&drop to some extent, have a start menu for applications, a  
> file-manager, and so on. I was not using Xubuntu for a long time  
> myself. My experiences are limited to using several Xubuntu-Desktops  
> in virtual machines for trainings on IT-Security, where each student  
> had a whole network of up to 5 virtual machines running on his/her  
> PC. Imagine if I had used some full equipped Gnome-Desktop (or even  
> worse Windows Vista) for the 3 virtual workstations? But Xubuntu was  
> fine, running with 64 MB of (virtual) RAM, and students could easily  
> start Thunderbird, Firefox, Wireshark, Nessus and so on.
> 
> For text-processing there is Abiword pre-installed on Xubuntu- 
> Desktops. It can definitely save ODT-Files. I just wrote a small  
> testfile, copied it to my OS X machine and opened it there with Neo  
> Office (a OpenOffice-Clone) without problems.
> 
> > And if one _has_ to install it, one also ends up with a lot of
> > code which can be reused for PIM, the other crucial area of any
> > SOHO/educational desktop.
> I don't know if I got your point: But an address book is included in  
> Thunderbird.
> 
> Anyway, just have a look at it, LiveCDs are availabe here: http:// 
> xubuntu.org/
> And if you have VMware, there are virtual Appliancs with Xubuntu  
> installed:
> http://www.vmware.com/appliances/
> 
> An other area, where I used Ubuntu on a limited systems is putting a  
> whole Systemmonitoring/Trendanalyses-solution on a Soekris box. This  
> is a limited but very reliable hardware (no hard-drive, no fans, very  
> low power-consumption). You can find some images (and explanations in  
> German) here:
> http://lanti.wordpress.com/2007/07/22/ein-kleiner-feiner-systemmonitor/
> 
> This time I used Ubuntu-Server (as base for Nagios), which ends up in  
> a console-only system using approximately 500 MB on the "HD" (which  
> is in fact a Flash-Memory-Card).
> 
> Finally I have to say, that I learned a lot of interesting details by  
> reading and discussing on this list, which are still valuable for me,  
> even outside of the field of recycling outdated hardware.
> 
> Thanks, Ingo.

Thank you, Ingo, for your continued support and participation. I, too, have
learned a great deal from this list and the project.

Richard