December 2005
Beginner
480 pages
13h 27m
English
Content preview from Linux Server Hacks, Volume TwoBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Hack #73. Maximize Resources with a Minimalist Window Manager
Using window managers rather than desktop environments can improve the performance of slower systems or simply leave more system resources available for actual computing.
Graphical user interfaces such as KDE and GNOME are slick and easy to use, but all that eye candy has a price—executing and managing all of those graphical bells and whistles requires a certain percentage of system resources. A typical idle KDE desktop on SUSE 9 Enterprise occupies around 370 MB of RAM. For today's servers with multiple gigabytes of RAM, this may not be an issue. However, if you're running a legacy server that contains less than a gig of RAM, you could certainly benefit from the use of a more modest graphics system, known as a window manager. Window managers focus on displaying and managing windows, not drag and drop and other luxuries. One of the best lightweight window managers is Fluxbox, an open source software package available online and derived from the Blackbox window manager, which is itself an open source clone of the window manager used on old workstations from NeXT. Using Fluxbox can decrease the amount of RAM required by your GUI by over 100 MB, and also eliminates the ten zillion background processes that desktop environments such as KDE start to support things like drag and drop, automatic file associations, and so on. This hack explains how to build and install Fluxbox so that you can devote more of your system's memory ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.