Me And TinyMe

[dorkbean]

Incorrectly (by me) originally posted in the PCLOS forum:

I wanted to share my Linux experience and how Windows and PCLinuxOS has shaped it. Some background - I have several years of PC/Networking/Server support in a Windows environment, but moved on to work in business. I never left the PC skillset behind though and loved to tinker, fix, and certainly not throw away. In lieu of having new computers or mobile laptops, we have desktops dispersed throughout the house. Two were given and one was $5 in a yard sale. I found I could tweak Windows XP to be less resource intensive, but there was always the security updates, worries about a bloating registry, and whether I had done enough to protect these computers that spent a good bit of their time on-line. I had been a fan of PortableApps for some time and with the advent of the Live-CD, I recognized the ready ability to try distros risk-free and that Open Source software was sufficient for my computing needs.

After learning about window managers, X11 environments, package management utilities, etc. I had a good idea of the playing field. PCLinuxOS was one of the first distros to get a "WOW" response, running compiz and beryl from the and working with my TV Tuner card from the live CD. Everything worked; everything but my wireless NIC. After much reading, searching, and a bit of luck I was able to use ndiswrapper successfully with my card. My next question was whether I could get the application set I wanted in TinyMe and use the more lightweight OpenBox environment. The box in question was a 500Mhz/384MB/6GB and though I found KDE snappy from the PCLOS 2007 Final boot environment, I wanted to save as many resources as possible for the programs themselves. The result was overwhelmingly yes - TinyMe allowed me all the functionality I wanted. Though a small distribution by default, I installed OpenOffice, Firefox, MPlayer, VLC, and GCompris quickly and easily via synaptic. With a touch more work, I configured the system to automatically log since this computer is for my wife to browse the web primarily (she does like the geweled) and should "just work". With a 1.5 GB footprint for the OS and apps I have everything I will reasonably need on the machine. Booting and application performance are much better than XP and I don't worry about that machine any more. Thanks to everyone who helps contribute to this "radically simple" computing experience.