[mythtv-users] Replacing KDE with Ratpoison

David George david at thegeorges.us
Thu Dec 9 15:22:01 UTC 2004


On 12/9/2004 8:32 AM, Phill Edwards wrote:

> This is only slightly different to Nate's in the last 2 lines - 
> ratpoison is exec'd and mythfrontend is just run with no ampersand. 
> This means that I can exit out of mythfrontend back to the window 
> manager which is good because then the automatic shutdown/nvram-wakeup 
> stuff can run.

Good point.

> Also, it means I can do maintenance work etc from the window manager 
> by calling up an xterm for example. This solution seems to work 
> exactly like KDE was working except it's running Ratpoison as the 
> window manager.

Ctrl-T c to create an xterm window in Ratpoison.  You don't even need to 
exit mythfrontend.

>
> I liked his solution best because it boots into runlevel 5 (X Windows) 
> which means I can also get console windows up by pressing Ctrl-Alt-F1, 
> Ctrl-Alt-F2 etc.

Hmm, I must be doing something wrong because these work for me in 
runlevel 3 also. ;-)

>
> Lastly, without wishing to start any flame wars, I couldn't see much 
> difference at all between CPU & memory usage when myth was idling 
> between KDE or Ratpoison. I was expecting to be amazed at how much 
> resources wee freed up, but there was very little in it.I can see the 
> attraction of Ratpoison, though, for minimalists.

No flame here.  The way Linux allocates memory you probably won't see 
any difference if you were just looking at the system memory 
usage/free.  It tends to use available memory for buffers and caches 
(which is not a bad thing, no sense in memory just sitting there with 
nothing to do!).  If you were looking at the individual processes, you 
should have seen a huge difference.  I don't have any info for KDE handy 
right now, but ratpoison is using 681K total, and one of my gnome 
systems is using about 310M by the time you add all the gnome processes 
together.  Granted my method wasn't all that scientific, I only added up 
the SZ column when doing a 'ps -elf', but still that much of a 
difference is huge.

--
David



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