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So, the other day I decided to play a bit with my laptop and optimise it for usual laptop-like activities (you know, carrying around, writing stuff at univ, browsing the web etc.).
Some things I had in mind during the process:
1. Lightweight OS/DM - with this particular laptop resources aren't a problem, but lightweight stuff tends to be faster, and speed is of essence when you're on a battery.
2. Least mouse-dependance possible - carrying around a mouse and plugging it in all the time isn't optimal in a crowded university environment.
With the main goal set, I started going into specifics.
Ad. 1.
I really like working on Linux, the problem here was choosing the right distribution to do the job. I decided on Arch as it doesn't install a bunch of stuff you'll never use (just the basic system, you have to get/install the rest yourself, allowing you to choose only necessary things) and making adding new programs fairly easy with pacman.
With OS out of the way, I now had to choose the proper desktop manager. I went with Fluxbox, which is not just lightweight and nice looking, it's also simple to use, offers a lot of customization options and most of all, allows you to assign hotkeys to everything you want anyhow you want. Not to mention several workspaces which prevent desktop-clutter and help organize your work.
End result in the looks department after some tweaking (note that I was unable to capture transparency in the screenshot, but that's not a big deal):
![[image loading]](http://img710.imageshack.us/img710/3905/84063654.jpg)
Ad. 2.
With all the basics in place, I then had to adjust the 2 most commonly used pieces os software: text editor and web browser.
Text editor was easy enough, since vim is a great and fast tool to make quick changes to files or doing smaller files. For more robust work there's always Emacs, with AUCTeX and RefTeX it becomes a great laTeX editor.
The (seemingly) hard part was getting rid of necessity for mouse movements in web browser (god I hate touchpads). The solution was very simple: Firefox with vimperator.
It not only gives you more viewing space in the browser by disposing of all the unnecessary stuff at the top of the screen (like address bar) but also allows for advanced control with vi like commands.
Sleek, mouse-independent browser:
![[image loading]](http://linux.softpedia.com/screenshots/Vimperator_1.png)
Final notes:
I really like my current setup, it's really fast and stable (not to mention it's great to use graphical OS/apps without the need for mouse). I'm still looking into possible ways of improving it (mouse-less image editing would be nice) and doing some thorough testing (how long exactly can it work on battery alone and if it would work as great on a laptop that's not as powerful - currently using Samsung r580 - since Fluxbox is lightweight enough).
Have any of you made similar attempts? Share them please! I could use some inspiration 
 
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Ahhh I love minimalist computer stuff. I like computers for their function, not as an extension of my being, so less is more.
My desktop has no icons and an autohide start bar, my few main programs are pinned to the start menu, and when I boot up the only thing that loads is volume control. I'm going to try this VIM thing.
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Heh, I can't have icons on my desktop. I'd have to install more software to handle such functions (which I don't really need, I mostly use console to do stuff in my system - although I did install Thunar just in case).
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Oh I got vim and this is fun!
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Kyrgyz Republic1462 Posts
I use Linux Mint with LXDE on my Atom netbook, it's really-really good.
I just love the aptitude package manager and since Mint is based on Ubuntu there are loads of packages available for easy install.
LXDE is a pretty good minimalistic DE with a nice file manager and a simple text editor. If you are really hardcore you can just use OpenBox and build your own DE around it, but I found it unnecessary as LXDE is (almost) exactly what I need.
I don't mind touchpads at all so I use Chrome as a browser (it's noticeably faster that Firefox on the Atom processor) and LyX as my LaTeX editor.
I also have the standard stuff like VLC, pidgin, skype and even Eclipse which surprisingly runs decently fast 
I also have Wine to play Heroes 3 ! :D
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@ Random: wasn't LyX WYSIWYG editor? I remember trying it some time ago and it didn't really cut it for me.
And I also got VLC for vidoes, Exaile (GTK version of Amarok) for music and other stuff. Still thinking about Wine, but I would probably only use it for Civ4 and I played it so much lately that I don't really want to install it for a while...
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Kyrgyz Republic1462 Posts
Well it's not really WYSIWYG as in it doesn't show you the end result as you type, but it has the visual formula editor and stuff like that, although you can skip that and just type in LaTeX. I find its ability to render formulas on the fly without running them through LaTeX useful.
I guess you wouldn't like it if you like vim or emacs style environments, but for me it's very useful to speed up editing without much LaTeX hacking.
![[image loading]](http://www.lyx.org/images/about/main_window.png)
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Might check out ratpoison for a wm if you're into that sort of thing
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All this effort to gain a tiny bit of speed/battery life.
I uninstalled vista from my Thinkpad X61 Tablet and it runs very smoothly on WinXP, almost every command is instant (I put in a OCz Vertex 60GB SSD) and battery life is gorgeous (~4 hrs web flash browsing) as well.
The slight increase in system speed just doesn't seem worthy of the troubles of such a bare Linux OS. But then again, if I had a 7 year old Pentium 3 laptop I'd probably think differently.
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ahh, good choices. I spent a lot of years on Gentoo and Openbox, pretty similar to what you have there. vimperator is awesome, but I use chrome instead of firefox now because it's faster.
something that I didn't realise at first with Arch was that it doesn't activate the ondemand cpufreq policy by default... the wiki page is decent. makes a huge difference in battery life. something that I don't personally use but some people like is laptop-mode. it covers some stuff that would normally be handled by gnome-settings-daemon or such.
nothing wrong with your application choices but I'd suggest you spend some time trying out mplayer for video and mpd (sonata is a nice client) or cmus for music. <3 mplayer.
oh and post a screenshot of your vim session (and your vimrc) some time.
+ Show Spoiler [my vimrc] +set nocp
set noet nowrap
set ai aw hls is ml nu sc sm tf
set bg=dark bs=2 ss=0 sw=4 sts=4 ts=4
filetype plugin indent on
syntax enable + Show Spoiler +yeah ok I was basically looking for an excuse to post my vimrc
EDIT: argh ignore that, I was reading too fast and didn't notice you're an emacs user.
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I use both Emacs and vim 
They're both great, but for different things.
+ Show Spoiler [.vimrc] +
syntax on
set textwidth=80
set noet ts=3 ws=3
set autoindent
set number
set ruler
set backupdir=~/vim_backup
set backup
set vb
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On September 01 2010 04:33 Manit0u wrote:
@ Random: wasn't LyX WYSIWYG editor? I remember trying it some time ago and it didn't really cut it for me.
And I also got VLC for vidoes, Exaile (GTK version of Amarok) for music and other stuff. Still thinking about Wine, but I would probably only use it for Civ4 and I played it so much lately that I don't really want to install it for a while...
IMO if you're going for light weight, then Exaile isn't a good idea. It's python = slow, even foobar thru wine was way faster.
Also, I wanted to ask - I'm using xfce, mainly because it was supposed to be fast and ligtweight (and it is, compared with KDE and Gnome - but that's not really a competition in this aspect), but could always be faster. Is Fluxbox better (faster)?
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Kyrgyz Republic1462 Posts
On September 01 2010 13:19 SoManyDeadLings wrote:
All this effort to gain a tiny bit of speed/battery life.
I uninstalled vista from my Thinkpad X61 Tablet and it runs very smoothly on WinXP, almost every command is instant (I put in a OCz Vertex 60GB SSD) and battery life is gorgeous (~4 hrs web flash browsing) as well.
The slight increase in system speed just doesn't seem worthy of the troubles of such a bare Linux OS. But then again, if I had a 7 year old Pentium 3 laptop I'd probably think differently.
For me it's not just speed, I find Linux much more useful. But that's probably because I work in a scientific environment.
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On September 02 2010 01:50 ZBiR wrote:Show nested quote +On September 01 2010 04:33 Manit0u wrote:
@ Random: wasn't LyX WYSIWYG editor? I remember trying it some time ago and it didn't really cut it for me.
And I also got VLC for vidoes, Exaile (GTK version of Amarok) for music and other stuff. Still thinking about Wine, but I would probably only use it for Civ4 and I played it so much lately that I don't really want to install it for a while... IMO if you're going for light weight, then Exaile isn't a good idea. It's python = slow, even foobar thru wine was way faster. Also, I wanted to ask - I'm using xfce, mainly because it was supposed to be fast and ligtweight (and it is, compared with KDE and Gnome - but that's not really a competition in this aspect), but could always be faster. Is Fluxbox better (faster)?
Originally I did have XFCE installed. From what I noticed (tested KDE, Gnome, XFCE and Fluxbox) FB is faster. I guess it's because you don't really get any desktop, graphical file manager, extensive menus and icons other DM's usually have and need to load on start.
If it's better, I can't really tell as it's the matter of personal preference. I wanted to have a system in which I could go (almost) entirely without mouse usage, and for that FB is perfect with its easy and extensive global hotkey management (although, in theory you could just hotkey your terminal - which is done by default under alt+F1 - and run everything from there, but it's not really the nicest of ways to do things).
And about Exaile... I know it's not really lightweight, I use it pretty rarely and have it because I'm a great fan of Amarok. Also, like I stated in the OP, lightweight is more of a theory when it comes to this laptop as 4GB RAM and Core i5 processor really give me a lot of space to use my resources (especially with my system using <1% CPU when not launching any software like firefox - CPU usage is at 2% when I'm writing this).
@ SoManyDeadLings:
It's not all that much effort if you like to do this (and I do). I've been using W7 on this comp for good 2-3 months, but it just didn't let me work the way I like, so I switched back to Linux and opted for some testing while I'm at it (I'm nowhere close to being advanced Linux user, but I like to learn new stuff and such endavours are a great opportunity to do so).
P. S.
Funny thing I've found just now. It seems that VLC is using less resources (CPU-wise, MEM-wise it's the same) than mplayer.
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Apparently this is the "post your vimrc" thread, so here's mine in Windows, embarassingly formatted as it is. I have no idea wtf some of the commands do, since it's been awhile since I changed things. I also use vim-latex for LaTeX editing, though I get the feeling like emacs might be better for that. I've used emacs some in the past too.
+ Show Spoiler [my vimrc] +set nocompatible
set autoindent
set smartindent
set expandtab
set tabstop=4
set softtabstop=2
set shiftwidth=2
set ruler
set incsearch
set backup
set backupdir=C:\\notes\\temp
set directory=C:\\notes\\temp
set clipboard+=unnamed
set gfn=DejaVu_Sans_Mono:h9:cANSI
source $VIMRUNTIME/vimrc_example.vim
source $VIMRUNTIME/mswin.vim
behave mswin
colorscheme custom
syntax on
set lines=46 columns=90
" remove system beep...
set noerrorbells
set visualbell
set t_vb=
"
" *** stuff for vim-latex ***
" REQUIRED. This makes vim invoke Latex-Suite when you open a tex file.
filetype plugin on
" IMPORTANT: win32 users will need to have 'shellslash' set so that latex
" can be called correctly.
set shellslash
" IMPORTANT: grep will sometimes skip displaying the file name if you
" search in a singe file. This will confuse Latex-Suite. Set your grep
" program to always generate a file-name.
set grepprg=grep\ -nH\ $*
" OPTIONAL: This enables automatic indentation as you type.
filetype indent on
" OPTIONAL: Starting with Vim 7, the filetype of empty .tex files defaults to
" 'plaintex' instead of 'tex', which results in vim-latex not being loaded.
" The following changes the default filetype back to 'tex':
let g:tex_flavor='latex'
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EPT
