On Tue, Dec 24, 2002 at 04:40:42PM +0000, Philip Christian wrote:
> The comments about KDE are interesting. In fact I cant get KDE to come up 
> on these 486/100Mhz machines.  

KDE IMHO is a hog, it is slow even on my P4.

> I got X to start up fine using a generic VGA driver, and so installed 

If your VGA card has acceleration, you might want to look into using
a driver appropriate for it, a 486 is going to need every bit of
release from CPU cycles that it can get.

> KDE3.  KDE gets to the login screen okay but logging in as a user seems 
> to crash X, and, it looks like it would need more memory as it was 
> significantly faster (to crash :-) ) with a bit more RAM.  So indeed 
> plan X or a nice lightweight window manager would be what I need. 

Plain X without *any* wm is impossible. Of course, X comes with twm 
but that is neither the most lightweight nor the most useful. Try 
pwm (my favorite ultra-light wm) or one of the blackbox clones. 
I also like Window Maker, but that might be a bit too heavy weight
for a 486. All of these are available in pkgsrc, and are as simple to 
install as adding a line to .xinitrc in your home directory for startx. 
PWM source is under 100K to download, a stark contrast to what you need 
to grab for KDE.