Fedora Desktop on XO

[Erik Garrison]

On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 01:31:12PM -0500, Chris Ball wrote:
> Hi Peter,
> 
>    > How did you go with this? Did you have any luck? I also realised
>    > that if you drop gnome-user-share you'll drop all the httpd
>    > requirements.
> 
> Yep, it worked!  I had RPM conflicts in GConf2 (against GConf2-dbus,
> both ship the same .mo files) and evince (against sugar-evince, both
> ship the same evince backend shared libraries).  Also, it turns out
> that evince-dvi is responsible for bringing in texlive, via kpathsea.
> 
> Here's the command I'm using now:
> 
> -bash-3.2# yum -y install NetworkManager-gnome alacarte at-spi bug-buddy
>  control-center eog file-roller gcalctool gdm gdm-user-switch-applet
>  gedit gnome-applets gnome-audio gnome-backgrounds gnome-media
>  gnome-panel gnome-power-manager gnome-screensaver gnome-session
>  gnome-system-monitor gnome-terminal gnome-user-docs gnome-utils
>  gok gthumb gucharmap gvfs-archive gvfs-fuse gvfs-gphoto2 gvfs-smb
>  libcanberra-gtk2 metacity mousetweaks nautilus orca
>  pulseaudio-esound-compat pulseaudio-module-gconf pulseaudio-module-x11
>  scim-bridge-gtk xdg-user-dirs-gtk yelp zenity
>  
> Total size: 152 M
> 
> After that completes, you can put "exec gnome-session" in ~/.xsession
> and restart X to land in a very normal looking F10 GNOME desktop.
> (I haven't tried to do much with it yet.  Sound works, at least.)
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> - Chris.

Sweet.

Now, the question I have is why we would chose GNOME over XFCE.  I think
there are significant differences in system resource consumption.

I ask because the impression I had from informal tests was that a system
booting into GNOME was consuming about 3x as much RAM on boot (read via
ps_mem.py).  My impression was that the benefit was not eaten up the
moment the I started running GTK applications; it seemed that under XFCE
I could open a fair number more Firefox tabs without running into lockup
than under GNOME.  I know these aren't great metrics so I'll run some
more rigorous tests after we have two systems side-by-side for
comparison.

Even though XFCE is not a Fedora-supported desktop environment, it is
readily supported in other distributions.  We could easily borrow the
polish that XUbuntu has applied to its distribution and get a system
equally usable as GNOME.

Erik