Re: fairly dumb question about icewm floppy icon and desktop software....

On Thu, Nov 30, 2006 at 09:47:33PM +0000, Michael Fothergill wrote:
Dear Debian folks,

I recently stuck a 13 GB drive in a Gateway 2000 Pentium 133 Mhz
ancient PC.

I did that in a 486DX4-100


I loaded Sarge 3.1 r3 on it.


I could never get the sarge installer to work on my 486 with only 32 MB
ram. I installed woody and upgraded.

This was a slow process and involved a certain amount of farting
around in the installation but in the end it worked.

On a machine like this gnome is a non-starter. It is too slow.


Isn't it always? [duck]

So I bunged icewm on instead and it works OK speed wise.

It feels right.

But I have some ignorances that are spoiling my fun a bit.
don't ignore it


One thing is that I can't seem to find any icon for the floppy like
there is in gnome.


What does that icon do?

What do you do here? Do you open a terminal window put the floppy in
and use the mount command to read it?


Yah.

If you want you could add an icon to the toolbar that instead of
starting an xterm would just run the command 'mount floppy'.

What app do you want to 'read' it with? I use mc in an xterm if I use
anything more than bash in an xterm.

What about a CD?


ditto

Have you installed a menu-editor for icewm, it makes it easy. There's
also a preferences editor available.

Another problem I have is that Openoffice takes ages to load and I
think the machine is struggling a bit with it.


So don't use it. Thrashing your drive because you don't have enough
memory is a good stress test for the drive. It will eventually fail
that stress test. Then its your turn...

There doesn't seem to be any abiword or whatever it is in the default
icewm installation. Presumably if I install abiword using apt then it
will be automatically incorporated into the icon set up and I will be
able to fire it up from the window manager....


You're confusing a desktop environment (gnome) with a window manager
(icewm). A wm is just that. If you want abiword, install abiword. If
you want Lyx, install Lyx.

They will not automatically show up on the tool bar. They __will__ show
up under the applications menu hook as part of the debian menu system.

It's shame that Openoffice 1.1 is so slow because I like what it
does....

What does it do for you?

A smaller spread*** software would also be useful.


I use gnumeric on my 486.

I ended up using the openoffice print manager or whatever it is to
configure the printer.


I used foomatic's python-based setup with printtop if I want something
other than the command line. Then again, right now I'm running lpr with
a plain-text dot-matrix printer.

I trust this is what you are supposed to do. It didn't have as many
drivers as the gnome beastie and so I am not sure if it will drive the
Epson C86 smelly inkjet printer I use.


Check out linuxprinting.org to see what driver. You may need gs-esp
instead of gs-gpl.

I will do what I can with it.

Suggestions on how to get this system to work about as well as can be
expected given the old hardwre would be appreciated.


Learn to love the command line, vim, mc, lynx, mutt, pinfo, enscript,
pr, fmt, dillo for when you want graphics but don't need java or https,
gnumeric, gqview, wV or anti-word, and firefox (sarge) or galeon (etch)
or something when you really need a full featured browser. For me, on
the 486, firefox takes 15 minutes to load and 2 minutes between mouse
clicks. Gnumeric and xfig are useable.


Doug.


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