Re: Looking for distros suitable for low-memory/low processor situations.

In <NvKdnQaMe51IOH7bnZ2dnUVZ_rXinZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxx>, on Sun, 09 Sep 2007
02:50:45 -0500, sk8r-365, sk8r-365@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Horton heard a Who named Steve Ackman saying:

Actually you don't even NEED the window manager.

When my wife's laptop was a P200 w/32MB RAM, I had
her login to a console which had a text menu. She
could type "A" through "F" and that menu choice would
run just under X. Anything beyond those, she'd either
have me tell her the command, or add another menu entry.

So, let's say she wanted Netscape. Hit "A" <enter>
and Netscape would be the only thing on the screen.
It wouldn't have Window decorations, so when she was
done with it, she'd do the pointy-clicky thing on
File -> Exit, and be dumped back to the menu.

That's a rather unusual way of doing it, but still
easier for the non-multitasking newbie than say firing
up a really lightweight wm like tvm, and having to
remember what commands to type in the xterm.


Would you post that text menu?

I don't know what good it'll do you... and it was a
long time ago, so this may not be exact:

a) Netscape
b) Star Office
c) Xjewel
d) xpdf
e) gimp
f) xgalaga

Oh, I bet you really wanted more than just the text
menu didn't you? ;-)

In order to get that to work, you have to write a
menu program (I used a shell script) and replace that
into the user's shell entry in /etc/passwd.

The menu script probably consisted of read and case
commands. This was on an IBM Thinkpad running RH 7.1
that hasn't booted in many years. I don't even know if
we still have it. I certainly don't still have the
script I wrote, but any book on shell programming
should have an example that shows how to read input and
execute a command based on that... a command that
probably looked something like

xinit $(which netscape)

From a terminal you can see what this looked like
with
$ xinit $(which Xapp) -- :1
(where Xapp should preferably be something you're not
already running on your present display)

You can see the same thing from an xterm, but you
may have to use sudo, which will then use your root
settings.
.

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