Interested in container computing? Check out my latest project, Bastille.

How many of you have older hardware? I know I’ve got a few machines that I can’t take myself to throw away. It’s ok though because we all run Linux which is very kind to old hardware (Don’t throw away good hardware, use Ubuntu!) For those of us with even older hardware we might need to tone things down just a bit. How do we do that? We’ve got a few options, let me go over a few:

First, if we’re using GNOME (which is the default desktop manager) we can tell it to tone things down a bit using gconf-editor. Try the following and see how much difference it makes in your responsiveness:

ALT-F2 : gconf-editor

set "/apps/metacity/general/reduced_resources" to true

Or, if you’re using KDE you’ve got a few options as well. note: in my experience KDE is the least hardware friendly (as far as responsiveness and memory requirements). You can try running (or installing if it isn’t included) a program that will allow you to reduce the eye-candy level of KDE:

kpersonalizer

Now for those of you that have hardware that served back in the war, or want to venture into some new desktop manager options you can install any of the following:

Xfce - sudo aptitude install xubuntu-desktop

Fluxbox - sudo aptitude install fluxbox

Enlightenment - sudo aptitude install enlightenment

Blackbox - sudo aptitude install blackbox

Openbox - sudo aptitude install openbox

Afterstep - sudo aptitude install afterstep

FVWM - sudo aptitude install fvwm

WindowMaker - sudo aptitude install wmaker

note: you’ll also want to install a menu application that keeps the different Desktop Manager menus separate. Install the package menu using your preferred method (command line or Synaptic Package Manager) and, after installation run:

sudo update-menus

Now you might be wondering how to switch between these new desktop managers. It’s really simple and you can very easily have any / all of these installed at any time and switch between them all.

Logout of your current desktop manager On the Login screen find the “Options” button Select “Sessions” and select your newly installed desktop manager

It will ask you if you’d like to switch to that manager just this time or if you’d like to make it the default. That is, of course, up to you. If you’d like like to give things a test-drive just use it for this session. You can easily switch between any desktop manager using the same method. So what are you waiting for? Check out some of the other available Desktop Managers and make your desktop completely unique to you! Ooh and, of course, many of these alternates are MUCH more lightweight and work GREAT on older hardware!