I re­cent­ly ac­quired a re­al­ly old, Celeron-class lap­top with some­thing like 128 MB of RAM and a 10 GB hard drive. It came with Win­dows ME, but I want­ed to in­stall some form of Lin­ux on it and make it at least marginal­ly use­ful, as sort of a lightweight fam­i­ly PC. I have but few goals for this ma­chine: it should be able to surf the web (no Flash nec­es­sary; would even sac­ri­fice JavaScript), it should be able to pro­cess Word doc­u­ments, and if at all pos­si­ble it should be able to run some old­er Win­dows apps us­ing Wine.

My first at­tempt at cre­at­ing such a thing came with Xubun­tu 8.04. At first I tried to use the bun­dled Fire­fox 3 and Xfce desk­top en­vi­ron­ment… but as it turned out, that was too much for the slow hard drive and pro­ces­sor of my old com­put­er. I de­cid­ed to re­place Xfce with IceWM, an old fa­vorite of mine. Sim­i­lar­ly, I re­placed Fire­fox 3 with Mi­dori, a much lighter-weight web browser based on We­bKit. I kept the Xfce ter­mi­nal em­u­la­tor though, be­cause I much prefer it to xterm and don’t want to in­stall gnome-ter­mi­nal. I al­so in­stalled iDesk to provide some prim­i­tive desk­top icons.

Here’s a screen­shot of my awe­some new Lin­ux desk­top in ac­tion:

Screen­shot of IceWM with iDesk, xfce4-ter­mi­nal, and the GIMP

It is rather prim­i­tive, as you can see. Note the, uh, shame­less­ly ripped-off ti­tle­bar graph­ics. One prob­lem re­mains, how­ev­er: the com­put­er takes far, far too long to boot up. It seems to me that, de­spite Xubun­tu be­ing rel­a­tive­ly stripped-down com­pared to reg­u­lar Ubun­tu, it’s still too bloat­ed for my old com­put­er. That is why this is on­ly “part 1”: my next plan is to see if I can build a su­per-lightweight Gen­too-based sys­tem for my old lap­top, hope­ful­ly with some­thing like soft­ware sus­pend (now Tux­On­Ice) to im­prove re­spon­se times. At the same time, I might take a leaf from gOS (1.0)’s book and use the En­light­en­ment win­dow man­ager.