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It's another for the lightweights. I am sure there will be some familiar faces present, but hopefully also some new additions. For this year's nominations, I'd like to encourage all participants to include a small commentary on why this particular app is the best LnF app for you over all others.
Here we go:
Kernel: Stock arch kernel
I've tried my hand at compiling, but it's not that liighter and compiling takes its toll on system resources as well.
WM: Compiz Fusion Git
Running on a light system, it runs smoothly and effortlessly on my intel 965gm. Good enough for my LnF needs. It wins partly on bling (which is actually mostly the organic feel that comes from it I like) and partly on terrific configurability.
DE: Xfce
Some people have complained it isn't quite as fast as it has been. And while that may be true. imo it has matured into a genuine DE that does everything I want from fullfledged DE while being significantly Lighter and Faster than gnome and kde.
Editor: Mousepad / Nano
Mousepad in X, nano from the commandline. My editing needs are limited and these are fast and easy to use.
File Manager: Thunar
Pcmanfm is a worthy competitor, but using xfce thunar is a natural choice.
Terminal: Terminal
Also a natural choice with xfce. Instant load, configurable and with nice transparency bling.
Browser: Chromium / Opera
First new nominee here. Google's Chromium browser has joined the fray and for the first time since 2000, Opera is facing stiff competition for my favoured choice. This despite opera 10 actually being a terrific browser and continually upping the stakes in the LnF department. In the end, it's a tie as I am genuinely using both equally much, but if Google keep improving their browser, it might well win out. The fact that I have gone away from mousegestures and have developed a stronger preference for pure gtk might also influence this though.
Email: Gmail
Chromium wins another point here. If there's one thing Google makes sure of, it is that their browser loads their webapps fast and well. And gmail is simply a superior interface.
Music: Consonance
Another new addition. Consonance is a fairly new app that manages my music well whilst being supremely fast. An instant favourite.
Image Viewer: Feh for regular viewing / Mirage for folder viewing
Feh is simply instant. The others can't compare to that when you just want to see an image. Ristretto ought to have been the obvious choice for 'advanced' image viewing when using xfce, but it is slower than mirage and has less functionality.
Image Editing: Mirage for basic editing / Gimp for advanced
Another plus for mirage is its basic image editing functionality, when you just need to crop or resize an image. Gimp is neither light nor fast, but simply the best one.
Pdf Reader: Evince-gtk
I was immensely pleased when I saw evince on aur stripped of all its heavy dependencies. It's now light, fast and has superior functionality to the usual light pdf readers.
CD burning: xfburn.
It works for anything I need it to do. It's light, fast and an obvious choice for xfce users.
Torrents: Transmission
Doesn't have quite the same extended functionality as apps like ktorrent, but it does what its supposed to and does it well whilst being very light and fast.
Video Player: Smplayer (+vlc)
the gtk video players just can't stand up to the qt apps for me. Smplayer has superb functionality (I just can't do without the remembering where files were last played function now), to make the qt dependency tolerable for me. I use vlc for superior dvd handling and for incomplete flash files which it handles well. My eye is watching parole, the new player being developed for xfce (xfmedia never handled video for me), but it's still too early days for it. Hopefully, it will be a candidate for next year's awards.
System Monitor: htop
Still the best. Simple as.
Archive Manager: Xarchiver.
Fast and works. Nice app, that comes with xfce.
Office: Openoffice
Like the gimp, Openoffice is neither fast nor light, but simply the best. Everytime I think about installing abiword for quick office needs, the gnome dependencies has me pushing 'n'.
Chat: Pidgin
Not particularly light, but when you use facebook chat, msn, yahoo, google talk and aim, it's an obvious choice. For voip, brr... skype.
CD Ripper:
Asunder. Get's the job done whilst being light and fast. Was very happy when I came across this one.
Best new LnF App of 2009: Chromium Browser
To make sure it's not just rehashing the old awards, let's see if we can find the best newcomer for the wards for this year as well. I think Google has made a tremendous step into the open source community with their browser.
Last edited by b9anders (2009-08-22 00:36:56)
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WM: Xmonad
This is my personal choice. I chose this WM mainly for their dual screen support. No WM does this better, it's just totally awesome. DWM would be a contestant if I had just one screen.
Editor: Vim, pure awesome.
Does this need an explanation?
File Manager: Coreutils + Findutils (find -exec ftw)
I like doing things in a terminal, and I don't get mc. Coreutils + find does everything you want faster then any gtk app.
Terminal: urxvt
Does what it should. And with the daemon-client version it is even faster. It also has a tabbed version(although I never used it)
Browser: Uzbl
The newest browser. And it is amazing. I love the philosophy behind it and it is amazingly simple to extend it to your wishes.
Email: Gmail
I don't use Mutt anymore. Can't see any advantages that mutt had over Gmail. To bad Uzbl doesn't like gmail very much...
Music: MPD + ncmpcpp.
Restarting X without losing the music, who doesn't want that.
Pdf Reader: ePDFview
I just want the basics and ePDFview gives me that. Maybe I should try apvlv again...
CD burning: growisofs
Who needs gui, and there aren't very much cli alternatives.
Torrents: Deluge
Since the split of the daemon and the gtk app it is incredibly easy to keep an eye on the torrents on my server.
Video Player: Mplayer without GUI.
Same thing as growisofs, who needs a GUI. And it has VDPAU!!!
System Monitor: htop
I wonder if somebody has an other one in the catagory
Archive Manager: The extract bash function, just tar for packing.
I mainly extract things and the bash function is perfect for that. If I have to tar something, I just use tar.
Office: Openoffice
The only one that works a little bit. Microsoft should bring a port of Office to linux. I would buy it. The fact is that the whole world uses MS Office, and I just want to be compatible.
The catagory's for apps I don't use I left out...
Last edited by Vintendo (2009-08-21 11:42:15)
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I
Image Editing: Mirage for basic editing / Gimp for advanced
Another plus for mirage is its basic image editing functionality, when you just need to crop or resize an image. Gimp is neither light nor fast, but simply the best one.
Mirage although very functional, is not light nor fast, *any* other C based viewer kicks its ass in those regards.
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b9anders wrote:I
Image Editing: Mirage for basic editing / Gimp for advanced
Another plus for mirage is its basic image editing functionality, when you just need to crop or resize an image. Gimp is neither light nor fast, but simply the best one.Mirage although very functional, is not light nor fast, *any* other C based viewer kicks its ass in those regards.
I timed it against cqview and ristretto and both were slower.
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Kernel: kernel26-libre
This isn't exactly for political reasons; it just boots faster with the default config, and the only non-free driver I need is my wireless card driver, which I load as a module.
WM: Ratpoison
Minimalism is about having only what you need and nothing more. ratpoison manages windows. Period.
Editor: gvim
I could use vim in the commandline but
File Manager: coreutils
I don't really _need_ a file manager.
Terminal: urxvt
I used to use sakura for its more sane copy/paste implementation (using GTK) but I very rarely actually do anything than copy URLs, which sakura refuses to launch for some odd reason? urxvt has more customizable color schemes and a working URL launcher. Copy/paste is a chore.
Browser: uzbl
I love this browser so much; I pretty much hate any site that comes along that makes it a pain to use.
Email: alpine
Pretty sane and usable email command line client. I really like it.
Music: moc
Image Viewer: Feh
Fast, as already mentioned; I should probably fix something in my ratpoison config so it doesn't stretch the window and tile images...
Image Editing: Imagemagick
All I really use is mogrify to resize stuff, anything else I typically do in Photoshop in my Mac because I despise GIMP.
Pdf Reader: apvlv
Sticking with the pattern of vim keybindings, a PDF user with vim bindings. Can't go wrong with that.
Video Player: mplayer
Nothing more. Nothing less.
System Monitor: htop, and if I really desire visual attention, slurm for network stats
Archive Manager: unrar, unzip, tar.
Command line. USE IT.
Office: antiword, gvim, LaTeX
antiword to read Word documents, gvim + LaTeX for writing documents and typesetting them.
Chat: pork + irssi
pork for AIM; irssi for IRC. bitlbee is a nice idea but I'm not sure it would be that great for managing my buddy list.
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Kernel: kernel26 + self-compiled
Default Arch kernel26 is OK but I sometimes compile kernel - just for fun
WM: Awesome
Nice configuration. The best are widgets.
Editor: vim
File Manager: MC
There's lots of bugs but I new version's coming soon (I hope at least)
Terminal: Xfce's default Terminal
fast, supports transparency, just a few dependencies
Music: MPD + ncmpcpp
music daemon - simply the best option when you often restart X
ncmpcpp - easy configuration, lyrics support, fast
Video: Smplayer
the only qt app I have installed without KDE dependencies. There's no good gtk frontend for mplayer.
Archive Manager: file-roller + unrar/unzip/tar/7z
File-roller - fast & light.
Unrar/unzip/tar/7z - no comment
System monitor: htop + awesome widgets
Image viewer: Gpicview
Very fast, almost no dependencies. Another good image viewer is feh - synonym of minimalism.
Torrents: rtorrent + screen
great minimal client. Try it!
Composite manager: xcompmgr
What to say... Fast & light but with current catalyst drivers absolutely unusable!
Last edited by cinan (2009-08-27 10:01:33)
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Kernel: stock kernel26
I compiled a custom once with a 1khz timer but I didn't like it
WM: Musca
Manual tiling is where it's at.
Editor: vim
Even if you only know the basics it's pretty great.
File Manager: pyfmii & coreutils
I wrote pyfmii and I can't live without it now. But I always have half a dozen non-FM terminals open.
Terminal: urxvt-tabbed
I don't like multiplexers, I just need tabs and dtach.
Shell: zsh
I like the shared history option.
Browser: firefox
It does the job. Except flash, I need to use get_flash_videos and midori for that. (addition: I need it for addons and the way it handles tabs)
Music: pyampc (mpd)
I wrote pyampc, because I really need an album based view.
Image Viewer: Feh / comix / gqview
comix for manga and such, feh for images, gqview for sorting (I use thumbnail + directory list with the image view tab hidden).
Image Editing: mtpaint
mtpaint is great. I have gimp installed too and used it once (successfully), maybe I'll try some tutorials to get into it (I could really use it)
Video Player: mplayer
What else.
System Monitor: pyampc
I hacked it a lot...
Archive Manager: atool
Tar bomb protection.
Torrents: rtorrent
Gotta have DHT.
Last edited by Procyon (2009-08-21 21:51:46)
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Kernel: stock kernel26
It does the job
DE/WM: xfce/xfwm
Slower than used to, but still fast enough for a DE
Editor: gvim(for coding), vim(in terminal), mousepad(random textfiles)
Vim is the greatest
File Manager: thunar (for volume management, gui), mc (terminal)
light and fast, the only thing I miss is support for tabs or multiple panels
Terminal: Terminal
...without the menus
Shell: bash
Browser: firefox
Javascript benchmarks are not everything, pages load in firefox faster than in any other browser I tried (opera,midori,aurora,konqueror), and the plugins are just awesome
Mail: thunderbird
I tried claws mail before, but I couldn't feel the difference
Music: xmms2 + etude
xmms2 just runs as daemon, etude is a new one -> I'm trying to put together a pygtk client for xmms2 (0.6+) - still in early stages, hope it's going to be fast
Image Viewer: mirage
Image Editing: mirage - basic, gimp advanced
Video Player: vlc, smplayer
sometimes smplayer has got a problem with high quality audios in mkvs, so I use vlc for that
System Monitor: htop
Archive Manager: no gui application
I used to use xarchiver, but the processor load is 100% during uncompression, so I just use commands in terminal
Torrents: deluge
Not really lightweight. But a damn good one
Office: openoffice, latex
Neither one is leightweight, but still I can use any editor for latex
PDF: epdfview
Chat: pigdin
Last edited by lman (2009-08-21 20:41:23)
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Perhaps these awards would be more useful if only apps that are actually L&F are nominated. I mean come on, OpenOffice as Light & Fast???
Just leave the category empty.
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WM: ratpoison. (or evilwm if you need floating windows).
Editor: vim
File Manager: bash
Since I've always got a terminal open, I can usually do the file tasks I need to do in the time it takes me to even open a 'real' file manager. And you don't get any lighter than having no additional program installed to manage files.
Terminal: xterm
Browser: conkeror
Firefox compatibility without all of the unnecessary bling.
Image Viewer: qiv
sort of old-school, but it's fast and solid.
Pdf Reader: xpdf
CD burning: wodim
Torrents: rtorrent
rtorrent + screen on a server, ftw!
Video Player: mplayer cli
A lot of video-player gui front-ends seem to be designed with a lot of style but poor usability, so I dispense with the front-ends altogether. And yeah, with the command-line interface of mplayer you have to learn the keybindings, but once you do, mplayer is light, fast, and totally unobtrusive.
Archive Manager: command-line tools like tar, gzip, etc.
If you want light, nothing beats using the actual commands without the extra front-end baggage.
Chat: Finch
Not really light, but has better usability than a lot of other programs.
Bob
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Perhaps these awards would be more useful if only apps that are actually L&F are nominated. I mean come on, OpenOffice as Light & Fast???
Just leave the category empty.
The reader can judge that. And it's still interesting to know why someone doesn't use a L&F app.
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Everytime I think about installing abiword for quick office needs, the gnome dependencies has me pushing 'n'
who said abiword had gnome dependecies? http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=25601/
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WM xmonad: Featureful, not too heavy, and easily customizable.
Text Editor Emacs: Yes, it can be considered light now. Plus it can do just about anything. Daemon mode is awesome.
Word Processing Latex: I just discovered this (well, tried it) under a week ago. Still, I'm already sold. The bibliography got me.
Browser Conkeror: Emacs-ified Firefox without fluff.
File Manager: I'd love to be able to say coreutils, but honestly, I normally turn to PCManFM.
Email Claws: Thunderbird was too finicky for me; Claws does the trick.
Music mpd+ncmpcpp: 'Nuff said.
Last edited by   Greg (2009-08-21 22:25:18)
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Music: Consonance
Hmm, hadn't tried this before, pretty nice. I'd put it a little behind Goggle's Music Manager though as it can't do internet radio.
Editor: Vim
+1, can't live without
Video Player: Mplayer without GUI.
who needs a mouse with 105 keys in front of ya
Setting Up a Scripting Environment | Proud donor to wikipedia - link
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Perhaps these awards would be more useful if only apps that are actually L&F are nominated. I mean come on, OpenOffice as Light & Fast???
Just leave the category empty.
No doubt. And, Open Office isn't close to the size of TeXLive most. Vim isn't particularly lightweight as far as editors go. XMonad is lightweight all by itself. Unfortunately it has a rather large dependency just to configure it. GHC, vim, and a limited subset of TeXLive account for 75% of the size of all of my installed packages.
This thread is going to be a 98% mirror copy of the 2007 LnF thread. Probably the 2006 one also. I'd really like to see people talking about newer stuff.
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Everytime I think about installing abiword for quick office needs, the gnome dependencies has me pushing 'n'
who said abiword had gnome dependecies? http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=25601/
ooh. thanks! Compiling now as I write this.
This thread is going to be a 98% mirror copy of the 2007 LnF thread. Probably the 2006 one also. I'd really like to see people talking about newer stuff.
Probably should have encouraged that in the first post, as I was hoping to see some of that that as well. Consonance and chromium are new and I think so is uzbl. But I think the fact of the matter is there are only so many apps out there that are new that are actually worthwhile and LnF.
edit: added 'a best new 2009 app' to see if there are any takers.
Last edited by b9anders (2009-08-22 00:37:32)
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Kernel 2.6.18, slightly customized
WM dwm. Fast, simple, powerful, pure. Honorable mention: evilwm, musca, ratpoison, dvtm for the console (a must)
Editor vim. Amazing keybindings and syntax highlighting (which is absent from e3). Honorable mention: e3
File Manager vifm. Vim keybindings and lots of powerful features. Honorable mention: mc, coreutils
Browser elinks. The only text only browser that has all the power of the big names, plus extra configurability and keyboard support.
Music mpd + ncmpcpp. A simple music player that will keep going if you kill X. Honorable mention: cplay + mpg123/ogg123
Photo Viewing gqview. Powerful but light and simple. Honorable mention: feh
Photo Editing mtpaint. A surprising array of features in a lightweight package.
Documents your favorite editor + LaTeX. Great math support and beautiful formatting for less.
Email alpine. It gets the job done.
Scheduling calcurse. A great calendar/appointment/address organizer.
Games freecell, myman, atc (bsdgames), vitetris. All amazingly addictive and fun. I'm still looking for a good CLI chess program...
Last edited by cardinals_fan (2009-08-22 01:23:41)
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
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Kernel: Stock arch kernel
Purely because I'm too lazy to maintain a custom kernel, and building one wouldn't yield that many benefits on my pentium3m.
WM: ratpoison
When your window manager's memory footprint can be paged to a floppy, you know you're a badassed dude.
Editor: Vim
Because I don't need my text editor to double as a email client/irc client/video editor
File Manager: bash and coreutils
I see no reason to use a graphical file manager
Terminal: urxvt
Does everything I need it to, uses ~5mb of ram, has transparency support, xft support (if I ever wanted it), compositing support (although you'd have to have me a knifepoint to enable it), a wonderful perl api, and pretty much every feature you'd ever want.
Browser(s): Firefox & uzbl
Sadly I don't actually use uzbl all that much, purely because I don't have it set up completely, and it's a bit sluggish without a caching proxy.. However, the potential is there.. and I love extending applications to my liking.
Email: mutt
Because everything else is just bad.
Music: cmus
Extremely lightweight, ncurses, 256color, supports OSSv4, supports a buttload of codecs, doesn't use gstreamer, vim style searching, last.fm support, remote usage via a unix socket with cmus-remote.. Pretty much the greatest media player ever.
Image Viewer: Feh & Comix
Feh is already pretty well covered . Comix is fantastic.. especially if you love reading comics/manga.. it's fairly lightweight, and pretty fast.. supports reading directly from all kinds of archive files.. basic image tweaking functions.. a dual page mode (just like you're reading a book), a "manga mode" for reversing the dual pages.. autopageflip.. all kinds of goodies..
Image Editing: imagemagick / Gimp
90% of the simple stuff I need to do can be done with imagemagick's tools (resizing images, rotating things, adding borders, making thumbnails w/desc, etc).. for those once-in-every-other-month times where I actually need to use gimp for something, I load up w9wm and use it.
Pdf Reader: gv
been using it forever.. too lazy to switch to something else.. it's also pretty light
CD burning: genisoimage/mkisofs + cdrecord
It's simple, and it's harder to get much more lightweight than that..
Torrents: enhanced ctororent
Extremely light (less than 1mb memory footprint).. has all modern torrent client features, including a hacky web UI.. pretty awesome.
Video Player: mplayer
needs no explanation
System Monitor: ps and kill / occasionally htop
ps suits my needs pretty well.. if I'm showing a friend something, though, it's easier to have a visual aid suchas htop.
Archive Manager: tar & 7z
no guis here!
Office: groff / Abiword
Sadly I need abiword for M$ document publishing.. but for stuff I throw together just to print, or to have around, I seriously just write it all in troff.
Chat: irssi + bitlbee
Been using irssi for a long time.. weechat seems fairly decent (has a smaller binary size, uses about the same amount of ram as irssi (~4m)), just already happy with irssi's scripts.. can't be arsed to switch. As for bitlbee.. I was originally a pidgin user, but once I switched to ratpoison, I basically didn't want to deal with manually managing those windows.. not that it was too much of a hassle.. but with the lack of a system tray and everything, pidgin just didn't seem practical.
CD Ripper: rubyripper
oooooh yes.. if you haven't seen this.. wow.. Beats the pants off of EAC (take that, windows users!)
Best new LnF App of 2009: uzbl
uzbl really is awesome.. It's lightweight, uses webkit, is pretty fast, and does *exactly* what you want it to.. just going to keep getting more and more popular.. wouldn't be surprised to see some kind of uzbl-stuff.org or something in the near future with all kinds of goodies and scripts.
Last edited by nanosleep (2009-08-22 04:54:17)
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Kernel: stock kernel26
2.26.30
DE/WM: LXDE/ Openbox
Fast and light - very low footprint.
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3032 367 2665 0 26 153
-/+ buffers/cache: 187 2845
Swap: 2502 0 2502
2257 20 0 320m 106m 25m S 1 3.5 1:13.36 firefox
2113 root 19 -1 294m 15m 6948 S 0 0.5 0:18.47 X
2156 20 0 45468 10m 7084 S 0 0.3 0:02.25 lxpanel
2164 20 0 46496 10m 7416 R 0 0.3 0:00.69 lxterminal
1 root 20 0 1684 568 504 S 0 0.0 0:00.66 init
Network: wicd
reliable and never misses or crashes
Editor: nano/ leafpad
Notes/ planning: Zim
desktop wiki, simple yet powerful
File Manager: PacmanFM
fast.
Terminal: lxterminal
Browser: firefox
Archive Manager: jungledisk / S3
Used for3 years now. Fast reliable and auto backup nightly.
Office Suite: Go-openoffice
Big improvement over openoffice. Faster, somewhat better Office 2007 integration.
VM: Sun virtualbox-ose
ok, just so I can run XP and MS Office 2007 when I have to share spreadsheets
Code editing: gedit with html/ haml plugins
Last edited by chender (2009-08-22 05:07:42)
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thinkpad X60s [t400s coming soon] | archlinux i686 | xmonad | dmenu |
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Kernel 2.6.18, slightly customized
Just wondering - what's the appeal to not upgrading the kernel for so long for you?
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cardinals_fan wrote:Kernel 2.6.18, slightly customized
Just wondering - what's the appeal to not upgrading the kernel for so long for you?
He's running Scientific Linux- a stable release.
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I love these kind of threads, because I will usually end up learning about some new tool that I didn't know existed. In any case, here is my current usage:
Kernel: whatever Arch provides by default.
WM: Evilwm. Small and no config files cluttering up ~
Editor: Vi.
File Manager: Coreutils.
Browser: Firefox. I love its webpage rendering but it annoys me that I have to install GTK for one application.
Music: Moc.
Photo Viewing: Feh.
Email: Google Apps For Domains. I use Fetchmail to backup to my computer.
Last edited by RagePie (2009-08-24 13:01:43)
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wmii for WM, lyx for office (never used oo/microsoft office/abiword again, its that good for essays and notes).
abcde for CD ripper, most powerful CLI ripper I could find.
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Feel strongly about the following two, otherwise indifferent:
File manager: rox filer
Archiver: atools!!!
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WM Openbox.
Tried xmonad and found it a pain. GIMP breaks it.
XML is logical and windows go where I want them with a keystroke.
Mail.
Currently using Zimbra in a VM and viewing in a browser.
Nothing light about any Tomcat app but an enterprise mail server running in a 512k vm alongside Alfresco appeals to me and it works from every machine in the house.
I guess that makes it light for the purpose.
I may replace Alfresco with O2Spaces.
VirtualMachines qemu-kvm: Far less memory use than VirtualBox or VMWare. Supports just about every disk format and part of the kernel. Fast too.
Terminal: Currently using RoxTerm . Renders well, cut and paste works well.
Word Processor: Abiword unless I need MS compatibility then Word in Wine.
Spreadsheet: Gnumeric. I can finish the job before OO loads.
Music: mpd + pms. I use my Nokia E71 to change the playlists.
Last edited by thisllub (2009-08-25 12:29:50)
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