Faster! Faster!

My latest effort is to get programs to run faster.  This isn't so easy.  My current computer does wordprocessing.  So did my first computer.  In fact, they do it about the same speed.  Sure, the current version is a lot fancier.  But then, my first computer had 64k of memory and two 192k floppy drives or something like that.  You would think that by now, everything would be a blinding blur.  No waiting.

Not so.

Well, I guess "so" if I still used wordstar.  But all in all, I guess I'm a tad disappointed that all the emphasis is on bells and whistles and not so much on blinding speed.

Programmers make trade-offs and so do we in the applications we choose to use.  I could use 'damn small linux', but I choose not to.  But what the heck is making everything run so slowly?  What do we need and what can we do without?  How can we put our whole system on a CD or a flash drive?

So, I've been looking into alternatives.  Slax, Knoppix, etc.

I'm trying a go with "Window Maker" on my SUSE install.  A desktop that isn't a desktop.  Less overhead.  Since you can select which "desktop" to use when you log into SuSE, and since SuSE automatically installs Window Maker, might as well try it.  (By the way, Window Maker apparently gave up its windowmaker.org home page, which is the one you will find linked everywhere.  I have linked the current windowmaker.info.)

Nothing goes on the "desktop" except a few icons.  Click on the desktop, you get a menu of applications.  You can dock icons for some of the applications on the desktop so they are easy to find.

All this re-education can make you crazy.  You have to try something for awhile to decide whether you like it or not.  I used "deskview" before Windows 95.  It was much faster, much less overhead.  More of what I needed, less of what I didn't need.  But, it was a lot of work to set up and didn't survive in the post win95 market.  

Another option has come to my attention.  "Symphony" linux.  As far as I can tell, Symphony is a Knoppix version of Debian.  (As a SuSE user, none of this means anything to me.  My main concern is, "if I install this, how much work is it going to be to get all the apps. I want running and how difficult is it to keep up-to-date?"

Symphony uses the desktop as a giant menu system, with the four corners used to switch sets of menus.  it has promise -- but the "burn it/run it" iso takes some time to figure out how to use.  In some ways, it's like Window Maker -- but Window Maker wasn't too difficult to figure out how to "add to" because it adopted my existing SUSE menus.  And, I can switch to KDE to get back to familiar territory.

I noticed two things about Symphony right off.  The first was, it reminded me of the reason I never had the slightest interest in an apple computer.  Every time I looked at one, my question was -- what if I want to use programs that aren't already on the menu?   What if I want to write a program?  I remember looking at a "Lisa" computer -- a pre-Mac from apple.  It was more computer than the competition -- but only if I wanted to do everything "their way."

So, Symphony comes with some things on the menus, such as Abiword, Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim.  And I found myself sitting looking at the screen wondering "now what?"  That is, how do I get from the clean install to the way I really want to run Linux?  After reading through some of the online documentation, I had this sense that it could be done, but no immediate grasp of how to do it.  Yeah, I could easily call up a command line and start doing stuff the like an old-time linux user, but that requires a lot of research to figure it out.

SuSE has a good update/install system, so I haven't learned about the "apt" system, but I have read about it and it sounds good.  Symphony says it works with "apt".

If I get around to working with it more, I'll report back.  I'm hesitant to load it, since I have SuSE installs on my computers and it takes a fair amount of time to install it, download all the updates and make the personalizations I like to do on the system.  So, switching to an "unkown" is not something I want to do unless it promises some big improvement.

Symphony OS can be run from its Knoppix CD, but then you can't do much in the way of customization.

Which brings us to the "unionfs" system.  This is really interesting, though I don't necessarily have any need for it.  Slax and Knoppix create a ramdisk, which becomes the "read/write" location for whatever changes you make during the session, because you can't write to a CD.  Unionfs bundles together several directories into "one."  So, a read-only disk becomes writeable in a sense.  

Unfortunately, I haven't worked through the bugs to make this work.  The idea is to have a CD and a flash drive in my pocket and be able to use any computer I come across with my very own, familiar, linux setup.  How cool is that?

Although, I will say that it may end up being one of those "cool" things that gets eclipsed before it is ever a widely used tool.  I have seen a lot of that over the years.  The reason is the constant increase in hardware capacity.  For instance, I had a lot of solutions for using a dial-up internet account (and I still pay to maintain dial-up access "just in case.")  But with wifi everywhere and using DSL and cable connections to the internet, all the old clever dial-up tools I had are (a) obsolete; and (b) I've forgotten how to use them.

My point being, what keeps you from putting your entire system on a 60 gig. ipod or a 16gig flash drive and booting from that?  No need to "union" a bunch of directories, just plug'n'go.  And how long until we have fold out screens and keyboards so that something the size of an ipod, along with a couple of folded up things in your wallet, can function as an entire computer?  (or "projection" keyboards and screens, I saw one prototype that merely "projected" a keyboard image onto the desk, or a piece of paper, or whatever, and that became the keyboard!)

With SLAX, it is possible to specify an alternate "changes" directory for the r/w location at boot.  I haven't found the same option in the Symphony/Knoppix startup.  (My thought was to start up from the CD, but use a directory on my linux partition for everything else.)  There is another command in unionfs that allow you to change the r/w location -- but first you have to know the "Union" directory you are changing.  In SLAX, it's the root directory "/" -- that's easy.  But in Knoppix, I get told that is not a valid "union".  As far as I can figure out, unionfs doesn't have a command that will tell you what the "union" name actually is -- you've got to know it.

Or maybe not, but again, these are all learning curve issues.

Let me know if you figure something out!










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