On 9 August 2013 21:23, Mark Trickett <marktrickett@bigpond.com> wrote:
I have managed to install Debian 7.1.0 on an Acer Travelmate 3230, even coping with the binary blobs during the install. It is generally working well, standalone, but now I am looking to sorting out and using now and then networked. First, I am finding the Gnome 3 series different, and not certain that I either appreciate or like. Any comments about making it behave more "traditionally" appreciated. I may need to remove a great deal and install a lighter desktop, the Notebook is maxed out with 1.5Gig of RAM. [...] Overall 7.1 is reasonably impressive, but I would still appreciate a lighter version. I am inclined to do a base install as a command line only box on something with perhaps a PIII or PII and 256 Mb of RAM, or even less. There are other distros, but there are reasons I am looking at Debian, primarily the apt toolset.
I'm very happily running Debian 7 with LXDE on several 10 year old machines. On a Celeron(R) CPU 2.40GHz with 1GB RAM, 'free' says used-(buffers+cache) = 120 MB. On a PIII Mobile 1.133GHz with 640MB RAM, 'free' says used-(buffers+cache) = 69 MB. The only fiddly thing I have noticed with LXDE is the menu and panel rely on .desktop files which I found are not provided with many Debian packages which I think use debianmenu instead, but it's not hard to create them. The most useful howtos to do this are not hosted by LXDE or Debian. For future releases, LXDE is migrating to Qt, but they say that they are not dropping gtk2 support, just not moving to gtk3. CUPS works here. I don't use Wifi.