--- Linda Laubenheimer <ljl@rahul.net> wrote:
> in less than a day, not the three+ it ended up
> taking.  The compiling 
> alone took 36 hours, and I had to check it

3 days? Wow. My Celeron 366 would do it faster than
that (about 26 hours or so), and to be honest, that's
about the lower end of CPU power to reasonably run the
latest versions of KDE...

> Aaagh!  Although watching stuff compile can be fun,
> it is a real 
> problem when you are on a shared computer, and the
> other person wants 
> to get their email... 

There's a cool way around this. Normally you can just
nohup it and send the output to a log and be on your
merry way, but that doesn't always work every time if
manual intervention becomes required. Check out VNC.
You can run another X desktop in never never land and
connect to it either locally or remotely (if security
concerns allow) and you never have to worry about it
getting stepped on, and it's a cool way to manage
things for they way I do them.

> Amen.  They eat resources, take forever to compile,
> and that's not 
> happy.

Again, there are other desktops that are quite
functional that don't suck down too many resources
(other than the Xserver that is which can be quite
hungry). My current fave is xfce, but I also try out
sapphire once in a while because it's pretty. VNC
coupled with a lightweight desktop is a nice way to
solve your above problem.

> Yet I've had KDE installs that worked fine.  The
> previous system that 
> I put it on didn't even twitch!

In my experience KDE is quite stable as well, and bug
fixes happen quickly. Much easier for the average user
to get around in than Gnome. Gnome remains too GPL
geeky while KDE just goes about the business of making
a functional desktop.

> My desire is for a windowing system that is a little
> more attractive 
> and configurable than plain X.  I need to be able to
> get users up and 
> running on it *fast*, and not get a lot of "how do

Again, there are quite a few cool desktops out there,
and xfce works quite well in a rather small footprint.
But KDE will always be my preferred desktop.

Andy

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Send FREE video emails in Yahoo! Mail!
http://promo.yahoo.com/videomail/