GDM -> graphical login manager
Yaourt -> Access additional unsupported repositories using pacman-like commands
Firefox -> Web Browser
Flashplugin -> view flash in web browser
jre -> view java in web browser
mplayerplugin -> view embedded video in web browser
Thunderbird -> lightweight Email Client
Mplayer -> Movie viewer
Songbird -> music collection manager
Abiword -> Word processor
Abiword-plugins -> Common plugins
Transmission-gtk -> Bittorrent client with gtk gui
Xpdf - > view pdf documents
Limewire - > gnutella/bittorrent client
Pidgin - > Chat software
Shaman - > Easy program manager
I won't be going into detail on how to install these packages. If you read part one, then you have a handle on how pacman works. Yaourt works in the same manner, it can download pkgbuilds from the aur however and compile them on your machine. To check what versions of a package are available use the pacman/yaourt search function ie..
yaourt -Ss filenameWhat I will be doing is informing on whether or not the programs were able to perform acceptably, and if not, what programs I chose to replace them with. These tests were my subjective analysis of what I felt worked best and fastest. No quantitative evidence is shown to support my theories, so your results (if you were to try this) may vary from my own.
GDM - > The system seemed slow to boot with GDM, and the options available turned out too confusing for my niece to handle. I removed GDM and replaced it with SLIM. The default options and simplicity are just what the doctor ordered, and the improvement in bootup time was noticable.
Yaourt - > Works as advertised! If you don't have it... GET IT! Fantastic tool to simplify installation of programs not in the regular repositories.
Firefox - > Surprisingly the default firefox install was the best performing of the browsers I tried on this box. I was expecting kazehakase and opera to outperform firefox, but they did not. Flash performance was noticably better on Firefox than the other browsers and embedded video was shown flawlessly. A note on flash, performance is not fantastic, but it's definitely watchable. I kept firefox on this machine, although I was fully expecting the need to switch.
Thunderbird - > Thunderbird performance was not what I would call usable. With other applications open, such as firefox and songbird, we quickly entered the realm of swap usage, and on this old machine that just won't cut it. I replaced Thunderbird with Sylpheed and ended up using about 40 megs of ram less! Sylpheed lacks some features Thunderbird has, but is more than adequate for her basic email needs.
Mplayer - > Performance of the base mplayer seemed ok. It lacked the ability to show video in 16:10 ratio, so I installed SMplayer to handle this. Smplayer then complained about the version of mplayer installed as being too old to utilize all smplayer functions. I replaced mplayer with mplayer-svn-nogui (no need for a gui as smplayer handles this ) from aur to gain full functionality. Installing codecs and libdvdcss allowed her to watch dvd's from the drive as well.
Songbird - > I like the promise of this application. When the bugs have been worked out, I think this will be a great app. Unfortunately, that time is not now. seg faults were common and the app didn't always cleanly shut down, requiring a killall songbird from the terminal. This might be ok for me, but not for the inexperienced. I replaced Songbird with a couple of apps. Gtkpod to sync with her ipod and Quodlibet to handle her music library. Gtkpod works as advertised and her ipod collection was quickly assimilated on this box. Quodlibet seems very lightweight and handles her music playback needs great.
Abiword and Abiword Plugins - > Work as advertised! Lightweight compared to openoffice and very functional.
Transmission-gtk - > Seemed to work ok, although the version in the repository I was connected to seemed outdated. I replaced this with transmission-svn from aur and now she's running the latest and greatest.
xpdf - > Works as advertised! lightweight and functional. Look no further than this for your pdf browsing needs
Limewire - > A bit of a resource hog to be quite honest, but an easy way to access the gnutella network for your filesharing needs. The one thing that bugged me was limewire continually asking me to upgrade to the Pro version. I installed frostwire instead and have an almost identical interface and no more complaining about upgrading! WOO HOO!
Pidgin - > Worked out of the box with no problems whatsoever.
Shaman - > A gui front-end to pacman. Very simple to use and my niece can upgrade her system on her own without outside intervention! A bit of a resource hog, so I made sure she understood to shut down other programs first before running this.
So the final list of installed apps is:
Slim -> graphical login manager
Yaourt -> Access additional unsupported repositories using pacman-like commands
Firefox -> Web Browser
Flashplugin -> view flash in web browser
jre -> view java in web browser
mplayerplugin -> view embedded video in web browser
Sylpheed -> lightweight Email Client
Mplayer-nogui-svn-> Movie viewer
SMPlayer-svn -> Slick gui for mplayer
Quodlibet> music collection manager
Gtkpod -> Sync ipod
Abiword -> Word processor
Abiword-plugins -> Common plugins
Transmission-svn -> Bittorrent client with gtk gui
Xpdf - > pdf viewer
Frostwire - > gnutella/bittorrent client
Pidgin - > Chat software
Shaman - > Easy program manager
All in all, it works pretty well. Some of the programs are a bit slower than on modern system, such as flash and shaman, while others are pretty much unusable on such an old system. However, with a bit of tweaking and proper software selection, you too can save an old system from the scrap heap and put it back to work.
Tips and comments are welcome.
Dave
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