Fedora Desktop on XO

[Greg Dekoenigsberg]

On Tue, 6 Jan 2009, Erik Garrison wrote:

> 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.

A fine question indeed.

> 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...

Note that this does *not* mean that Xfce is not available in Fedora. 
There are Xfce spins built for Fedora that you can download and run right 
now, and I'm sure they're comparable, and Sebastian Dziallas is working on 
making a more "official" spin right now.  It's all a question of what 
"official" means, and that changes in direct proportion to number of 
users.

> ...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.

--g

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