Making FreeBSD More Lean/Efficient On Older Laptop...

[Martin Roos]

Hi, 64 megs won't give you all that many options.

As stated by the others, gnome has to go. I have used windowmaker and
sawfish quite functionally, there was even a dock which could be used along
with sawfish (can't remember name by heart, sry) so it was a fully
functional desktop without the bloat.

Also avoid using firefox, it's consuming far too much ram on the machine,
opera may be better or galeon. If you can, avoid everything that is related
to gnome or kde, their background apps consume an enormous amount of ram in
your case. I run here on 1gb ram and even on me the ram runs really low
sometimes (for example acrobat reader can make "wonders" when it comes to
memory consumptions). Konsole and Gnome terminal you can forget as well,
grab rxvt or anything else alike.

Other than that, just get a lot of ram if you can, the cpu speed is not your
problem, your bottleneck is the ram and the slow swapping to the slow
harddisk.

ps. don't forget that X can also show you remote clients, if you can run the
heavy weight apps (or even the whole window manager) on another machine, do
it.

Good Luck,
 Martin


> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2006 13:59:28 -0400
> From: "DANIEL MAGNUSZEWSKI" <dmagnuszewski at mandtbank.com>
> Subject: Making FreeBSD More Lean/Efficient On Older Laptop...
> To: freebsd-mobile at freebsd.org
> Message-ID: <s4c623e2.013 at comrcm01intgwia.mandtbank.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> All,
>
> I'm assuming this is the correct forum for this - correct me if I'm
> wrong...
>
> I have FreeBSD 6.1 running on an IBM ThinkPad 600e, 64 MB RAM, PII 366
> MHZ. I have Gnome installed, and would like to "trim the fat" to get it
> to run as fast and efficiently as possible. Are there any
> pointers/documents that anyone can point out to me that would help?
>
> Thanks!
>
> -Dan
>