Recently I borrowed an IBM ThinkPad 390X for doing some small perl-for-web stuff on it. It is quite an old model with 500MHz CPU, 64MB of RAM and 11 GB of HDD. I added some more RAM so now I have 64+128 MB and this was the max I could do to improve the machine.
I have installed the Fedora Core 4 (custom install), booted up and started to look for some X window manager to work with, because I do not really like gnome a lot and KDE was a bit luggy. After looking on enlightenment, afterstep, fluxbox, FVWM and IceWM and stopped on the last one since it was fast, easy to set up, quite customizable, but not complicated. Since I really like some fancy stuff, I needed some nice terminal emulator which can support transparency, unicode and have tabs (although the last one is not so important, I really like when terminals do have such a feature). Looking here and there I tried many existing products including xterm, eterm, aterm, rxvt, mrxvt, konsole and gnome-terminal. All of these were either heavy or did not work as I wanted them to. Finally I found a project called \”Terminal\” which was an attempt to create something similar to gnome-terminal, but lighter and which would not require you to install the Gnome at all. I would say this is an amazing piece of work. I has all of the features I need, it is fast (a bit slower than xterm, but much faster than my default emulator konsole [from KDE]) and it is quite customizable as well so after 3 minutes of working around I almost didn\’t feel the difference between it and konsole I used to.
Next task was to find browser and email reader. For browsing I tried mozilla, firefox, dillo and links (with -g for X). I stopped on using firefox (the 1.5 is pretty fast) and links -g for for viewing my ebooks (which are in HTML). For emails I usually use kmail (or kontact package with all it\’s benefits) but it was too heavy to use it here so I decided to use thunderbird. I could also use mutt, but since all my mail is on two IMAP servers and I wanted to have it offline synchronized as well, I went to thunderbird which can do this job out-of-the-box instead of spending lots of time on setting offlineIMAP stuff and then binding mutt to it.
The only small part of the software I am missing now is some light office suite which can work with M$ Office files in the same good way OpenOffice.org can, so I am still using OpenOffice.org which is a bit heavy for my hardware and it takes it almost a minute to start up and then another half of it to load the document I need.
Anyway, I am very glad to see such a good working station for me, especially after noticing the label \”designed for M$ Win 98\” and imagining what I would do on the default OS coming with this laptop :)