Fedora 12 with LXDE = Fast & Small

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Like a the slug from a .357, this is one quick spin. I installed it last night on my 2.13Ghz MacBook5,2 (800Mhz RAM) and this distro freaking zooms! Best of all, it loads very quickly and uses about half of the RAM that Kubuntu 9.10 or openSUSE 11.2 KDE use. I am running it in Virtual Box as a VM and can actually do things within the Fedora 12 OS, while my MacBook has Mail, Safari, iCal, iTunes, iPhoto, etc... all open. Adding up the Wired, Active and Inactive memory, I have about 500MB of RAM still free. I gotta give kudos to this spin and highly recommend it if you want a full blown distro, but have a limited RAM budget. Granted, it's not big on desktop special effects, but it works well if you VNC into servers at work or your DR site, compile packages for work at home, etc... that sort of stuff. I'm pretty well sold on the LXDE experience now and may just switch my other distros to it as well.
 

vansmith

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I've never been a huge fan of Fedora, always having been able to find a distro better than it. The main reason was speed. I've always found Fedora to be a fairly sluggish distro and I've never been able to quite figure out why that is. Perhaps I'll have to look into LXDE - if not the Fedora spin then for my distro of choice (openSUSE). I'm always looking for a way to speed up my VMs while retaining some ease of use for regular day to day activities (hence why I've avoided something like Fluxbox for permanent use).
 
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Agreed, no Fedora fan here either. The only thing slower to boot up would be Solaris! Actually, I run both of those due to work. My favorite distro as well is openSUSE as well. Kudos to you Sir! :)
 
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Have you ever used Da** Small Linux...makes a great netbook. Fast and small.
 

vansmith

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Agreed, no Fedora fan here either. The only thing slower to boot up would be Solaris!
Solaris is terribly slow. For such a renowned Unix distribution, it really needs to improve on the speed. Granted, I did use it in a VM but even for a VM it was slow. I have to say that I was very surprised at how slow it was when I used it for the first time.

I just got around to trying the LXDE spin of Fedora (decided not to install it in openSUSE). I have to say that I am quite impressed. I haven't had a great deal of time with it but so far, I am very excited about it. I had heard something a while back about LXDE but ignored it figuring that GNOME satisfied all of my needs. I've always been a fan of lightweight DEs though, particularly XFCE which in my opinion strikes a pretty good balance between minimalism and usability.

While I won't be switching over to Fedora anytime soon, I am seriously going to consider using LXDE on my openSUSE install. I'll have to take a greater look tomorrow to see if it handles well in day to day tasks.
 
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Good deal. FYI... I've attempted to install the "packaged" version of 32-Bit openSUSE 11.2 LXDE and it has tanked every time, refusing to start or starting with long hangs. Currently, I'm downloading the whole 11.2 DVD right now to do a pick and choose installation. Since I have the space, my thought is to install KDE, LXDE, XFCE and maybe ROX. I'm thinking of doing my own small compile so use with a few AIX PowerVM controlled resources. The goal is to have a really light and tight DE for export DISPLAY= type stuff. Plus, it's fun so why not?
 

vansmith

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Yes, yes it is fun. I think it is now obvious that we are certified nerds. ;)

I'm interested to see if LXDE is noticeably faster than XFCE. Both are small and use GTK as the toolkit. I'll give it a try tomorrow in my openSUSE VM. I've found that the openSUSE packages are usually pretty good so perhaps you got a bad build. Which repo did you get your LXDE packages from?
 
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Actually, I downloaded the "Unofficial" "Live CD" from here...

Index of /repositories/X11:/lxde/images/iso

Key words to avoid being "Unofficial" and "Live CD". I'm going to just download the packages for me next attempt, figuring I can perhaps do better the the current LXDE CD.
 
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I am more of a Debian guy than Fedora. Always found Fedora harder to use compared to Debian based distributions.
 

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