AntiX Keeps Going For Low-End Computers

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AntiX Keeps Going For Low-End Computers

AntiX 13.1 was released this past week for those looking to load Linux on low-end computers. AntiX isn't a Linux distribution about killing off X.Org, but rather is about running Linux on low-end hardware...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTM5NDE

[mark45]

Gosh so far we had like a thousand Linux distros with low-end computers in mind, it's the cheapest and most oversold idea in the Linux world not worth an article, not even mentioning any such distro.

[Fenrin]

AntiX is a great distro! I was long time a Fedora user, but after I experimented with AntiX I soon switched. Now I am using Debian 7 with Gnome 3.

My favourite desktop environment on my AntiX installation is JWM for me. With a beautiful wallpaper and a change of the default theme (in JWM) via one click it really looks quite decent too. Without any programs open the 32bit version of AntiX 13 uses less than 70 MB on my computer.


I just did a quick comparison of how much RAM the different Linuxes I have installed on my system consume without any programs open:

AntiX 13 32bit, JWM 62 MB RAM
Fedora 18 64bit, Gnome 3.6, 410 MB RAM
Debian 7 64bit, Gnome 3.4, 263 MB RAM

My system has 2 GB RAM.

[Grogan]

There's nothing wrong with IceWM... I used that for some time on my Pentium II 266 with 128 Mb of RAM. That's what I had back then... I kept it until around 2001, too cheap to upgrade, (and believe it or not, I used to compile KDE on that box... by the time I got all the dependencies and stuff sorted, it took the better part of a day and all night to compile KDE 2 when it came out. Yeah, it used swap while linking)

I liked those old window managers, like IceWM. You just had to manually edit a few configuration files (only thing really mandatory was fixing up the menus to launch your shit). My favourite was this metallic red and gold oriental theme for IceWM, called Hao Yue.

Sounds like AntiX would be a nice little distro. I'll have to keep it in mind for resurrecting old boxes.

[ashkbajw]

I like low-end driven distros, but there's always the usability problem. Some lack apps, good repo systems, usable utilities, and stuff that just works out of the box without having to be half an hour configuring everything so that it can detect your wifi card.
Puppy extreme runs on 32 of ram an only uses 12mb after starting. I could not boot it in a K5 with 16 but it did work with 32, which is still a good number. But again it lacks a lot of stuff that is needed in an desktop for daily activities. And a world of troubles if you need to compile or install something that's not in the repos.
My machine is a 6 core, 8 of ram and a 4hdd raid 0 with 12ms and 700mb/s throughput. And even though my ubuntu with mate is about twice as fast loading programs, those from puppy, load in almost the same time in a K6 at 166 with a crappy 1012mb hdd which tops at 3MB/s read.....
Some stuff just bloats the entire system for the sake of useless stuff like hdd space, or the likes. Why the hell do i need the bluetooth daemon running in the backgroud when i dont even have a bluetooth dongle installed?
Why must i have to disable it when you just need a simple check to know that it's not needed....
Enable it when needed, disable it when not, that's how everything should be be default. Puppy does that.

Windows XP provides everything you would need compared to a gnome 2/mate desktop, loads in seconds compared to any ubuntu. and just needs 512mb to work. With 2gb or ram it goes at light speed.
Years ago the comparison was linux vs windows xp, now it's against windows7 but what has linux given us that windows xp didnt have?

[brosis]

I like low-end driven distros, but there's always the usability problem. Some lack apps, good repo systems, usable utilities, and stuff that just works out of the box without having to be half an hour configuring everything so that it can detect your wifi card.
Puppy extreme runs on 32 of ram an only uses 12mb after starting. I could not boot it in a K5 with 16 but it did work with 32, which is still a good number. But again it lacks a lot of stuff that is needed in an desktop for daily activities. And a world of troubles if you need to compile or install something that's not in the repos.
My machine is a 6 core, 8 of ram and a 4hdd raid 0 with 12ms and 700mb/s throughput. And even though my ubuntu with mate is about twice as fast loading programs, those from puppy, load in almost the same time in a K6 at 166 with a crappy 1012mb hdd which tops at 3MB/s read.....
Some stuff just bloats the entire system for the sake of useless stuff like hdd space, or the likes. Why the hell do i need the bluetooth daemon running in the backgroud when i dont even have a bluetooth dongle installed?
Why must i have to disable it when you just need a simple check to know that it's not needed....
Enable it when needed, disable it when not, that's how everything should be be default. Puppy does that.

Windows XP provides everything you would need compared to a gnome 2/mate desktop, loads in seconds compared to any ubuntu. and just needs 512mb to work. With 2gb or ram it goes at light speed.
Years ago the comparison was linux vs windows xp, now it's against windows7 but what has linux given us that windows xp didnt have?

Bluetooth kernel module is loaded on demand.

Windows XP is MUCH slower than any gnome 2/mate desktop. If you don't believe - compare it from power on till firefox is started with phoronix page. Since xp ms was experimenting with caching, so a lot of libraries get loaded in the background and one has an impression of usable desktop, but in fact - its not usable, since till any usable application can load, all the library chain must be loaded as well. XP is a slow resource hog. It also stayed down unpatched since vista on purpose, so that its performance is pathetic at best. Also, gnome2/mate is much more advanced than XP' explorer desktop, if you want similar - that would be fvwm95.

What linux gave us? Freedom, security, sustainability, efficiency, absence of DRM, open drivers with lifetime support, execute file attribute, repository install/upgrade approach and much much more.

[Ibidem]

I like low-end driven distros, but there's always the usability problem. Some lack apps, good repo systems, usable utilities, and stuff that just works out of the box without having to be half an hour configuring everything so that it can detect your wifi card.
Puppy extreme runs on 32 of ram an only uses 12mb after starting. I could not boot it in a K5 with 16 but it did work with 32, which is still a good number. But again it lacks a lot of stuff that is needed in an desktop for daily activities. And a world of troubles if you need to compile or install something that's not in the repos.

AntiX is a lightweight variant of MEPIS, so it's ~ a respin of a Debian-based distro.
Which means (a) it has tons of software an apt-get away, (b) it could/should have good hardware support.

My machine is a 6 core, 8 of ram and a 4hdd raid 0 with 12ms and 700mb/s throughput. And even though my ubuntu with mate is about twice as fast loading programs, those from puppy, load in almost the same time in a K6 at 166 with a crappy 1012mb hdd which tops at 3MB/s read.....
Some stuff just bloats the entire system for the sake of useless stuff like hdd space, or the likes. Why the hell do i need the bluetooth daemon running in the backgroud when i dont even have a bluetooth dongle installed?
Why must i have to disable it when you just need a simple check to know that it's not needed....
Enable it when needed, disable it when not, that's how everything should be be default. Puppy does that.

Yes, more work needs to go this way.

Windows XP provides everything you would need compared to a gnome 2/mate desktop, loads in seconds compared to any ubuntu. and just needs 512mb to work. With 2gb of ram it goes at light speed.
Years ago the comparison was linux vs windows xp, now it's against windows7 but what has linux given us that windows xp didnt have?

Odd that that doesn't match my experience with XP and Ubuntu on this Aspire One (1 GB RAM, 160GB 5400 RPM HDD, Intel Atom N270/Intel 945GME graphics).
Up through Jaunty, yes Ubuntu took a long time to boot...but it was just a few seconds over XP, considering the time to reach a useable desktop. I used xfce and icewm, finding the former miserably slow (I expected that going from the 550 MHz PIII/ 384MB Thinkpad I had before would result in a speed increase, not a drop--but that turned out to be just xfce vs icewm.)

XP sucked as far as actually running anything.
But booting Lucid Lynx, Puppy, or tinycore (with enough extensions to make it useable) left XP in the dust as far as boot time.

As far as what I gained over XP...
Speed.
Multiple workspaces.
A CLI that can do more than the Windows GUI and CLI together, faster.
A free development environment, capable of building drivers and many other things, covering C, C++, FORTRAN, Pascal, and more.
A web browser that didn't completely suck, and easy access to 15 other browsers.
The ability to update everything at once from one interface (rather than 3 different updaters covering a third of the software).
The ability to install software without worrying about which site to use.
A bundled office suite that had a chance of actually opening third-party documents (ever used MS Works? It doesn't.)
Python.
The ability to set up a second experimental installation, and to fix either install from the other.
A couple forms of sandboxing (AppArmor and chroot--yes, I'm aware of the deficiencies of chroot, but it has uses).
The ability to set up backwards-compatible environments without creating VMs (libc5 chroot).
Compatibility with a whole lot more DOS programs.
Email clients worth the time to set them up.
A game I actually enjoyed (go ahead, follow the link).
And a ton more control.

[pluto]

Assuming you have a large enough swap, Debian runs fine with 64MB of RAM using LXDE or XFCE. I think the graphical installer wants more than 64MB, but the text based installer works just fine with that amount.

[Luke]

IceWM is still relevent and used today

There's nothing wrong with IceWM... I used that for some time on my Pentium II 266 with 128 Mb of RAM. T.

It's also what I use on my netbook in preference to all other DE's. I could install MATE on that machine, but it would not start anywhere near as fast as IceWM, nor be anywhere near as responsive. On that machine, shutting off all desktop compositing (as well as Pulseaudio) and using a lightweight DE
allows it to play 720P video at 30fps and keep up. Forget that in any full GNOME environment on that "Pine Trail" Intel Atom machine. Same OS as all my other machines, IceWM is also my fallback when Cinnamon breaks. You can run Cinnamon on the netbook, but like it's gnome-shell parent (and Unity) it's too heavy and slow for it.

IceWM is not something someone coming from Windoze would find easy to set up, as you edit text files by hand, but is damned good for power users who
want to push a low resources box hard, old or new. Ultra light, a real taskbar, a real system tray, and any file manager you want to add. When set up by a someone who knows what they are doing, it can then be used by anyone who can use Windoze XP. Only real hassle? No calender in the clock!

[Ibidem]

It's also what I use on my netbook in preference to all other DE's. I could install MATE on that machine, but it would not start anywhere near as fast as IceWM, nor be anywhere near as responsive. On that machine, shutting off all desktop compositing (as well as Pulseaudio) and using a lightweight DE
allows it to play 720P video at 30fps and keep up. Forget that in any full GNOME environment on that "Pine Trail" Intel Atom machine. Same OS as all my other machines, IceWM is also my fallback when Cinnamon breaks. You can run Cinnamon on the netbook, but like it's gnome-shell parent (and Unity) it's too heavy and slow for it.

IceWM is not something someone coming from Windoze would find easy to set up, as you edit text files by hand, but is damned good for power users who want to push a low resources box hard, old or new. Ultra light, a real taskbar, a real system tray, and any file manager you want to add. When set up by a someone who knows what they are doing, it can then be used by anyone who can use Windoze XP. Only real hassle? No calender in the clock!

Similar here.
But there are a couple things I'll mention:
the "Icewm Control Center", which gives you a GUI to configure things (not easy to install on new distros, though!);
on Debian, install "menu" as well;
and if you want a calender application, you can change what clicking on the clock launches.
(I presume you didn't mean displaying the date in the clock, which is fairly easy.)

Oh, and there's builtin power, load, and network load displays. And it supports all the window manipulations, including "Rollup".

I thought this was interesting:

http://kmandla.wordpress.com/projects/lookalike-windows-xp-classic/