The Perfect PC
January 21st, 2011
Building the perfect PC
A couple of weeks ago I rebuilt my writing PC using Debian Squeeze and lxde. I wrote about it here and mentioned that I was so impressed with the performance that I was thinking about rebuilding my current main PC in the same way.
Planning
I used the rebuild as an opportunity to have a good think about what applications I used on a daily basis and a chance to see if any of the current applications could be replaced with better ones.
After a week of thinking I determined that the following would be the primary applications on my rebuilt PC….
Office
Open Office – I need this as a means of opening wordprocessed documents and spreadsheets that I receive from time to time. Maybe I will change to Libre Office when it is stable but for the moment Open Office will do. It’s what I’m used to, anyway.
PyRoom – I use PyRoom on my writing PC – it makes sense to install it on my main PC as well in case I get a flash of inspiration whilst I’m working on other things.
Abiword – I used to use this as my main wordprocessor. I still have many document sin AbiWord format.
Gnumeric – As with AbiWord
Internet
Chrome – My browser of choice. Blisteringly fast and now with enough extensions to make it a compete replacement to FireFox.
Transmission – For downloading ISO images of operating systems – I’ve not come across anything that does the job better.
Thunderbird – My current email client. Seems to me to be slower than it used to be?
Claws – I am planning to migrate many of my email accounts to Claws. It’s very fast and has all the functionality that I need. here are plenty of plug-ins as well.
Pidgin – I don’t do much instant messaging but, when I do, Pidgin works well enough for me.
Pan – The only Newsreader that I’ve ever felt comfortable with.
Accessories
Calibre – For converting ebooks into .mobi format so that I can read them on my Kindle.
Gedit – My test editor of choice. I’ve tried other but I keep coming back to Gedit; it does everything that I want and doesn’t attempt to do any more.
Nautilus – A great File Manager – I love the scripts that really enhance it.
pcManFm – Much faster than Nautilus – if only it were extensible by scripts as Nautilus is (I like to be able to resize images from the file manager; I can do that in Nautis but not in pdManFM.)
Sound and Image
gThumb – For importing images from my camera and for browsing them.
Gimp – I’m by no mean a Gimp expert but I find that it does pretty much everything I’ll ever need to do image wise.
Songbird – It’s a shame but it’s the only music player that I feel comfortable with. I’ll stick with this old version until the Nightingale project comes of age. I like the skins and, as all my music listening is by playlists I find that Songbird does everything I need. I do wish there was an applet to allow me to control fromthe panel (as I used to with RythmnBox) -that would be the icing on the cake!
ImageMagik – Needed for the Nautilus scripts and the od time when I need to edit/resize loads of images at the same time.
VLC – Alright, Gnome MPlayer will play most of my movies by VLC will play them all!
System
VMWare Player – I have decided to standardise on VMWare’s Player as my virtualisation tool. For me it works better than VirtualBox and is less fiddly than KVM. Hey, it just works!
Guake – I’m often launching a terminal to do bits and pieces. When I know that it’s going to be more than a 1 mintue job, it’s Guake that I’ll launch (by pressing F12.)
Synaptic – Whilst I’ll generally use apt-get to install new applications Synaptic does give me an idea of what applications are available. For me, Synaptic works better than some of the software selection tools that are available in Mint/Ubuntu/Suse.
mc – When working on the command line I find mc a godsend.
gnome-schedule – A simple way to manage cron jobs. I could do it all manually but gnome-schedule gives me an easy interface.
sendemail – I use this as part of my backup processes; for sending zipped files to a gmail account and also for sending the backup log to my gmail account.
Rebuilding the PC
Having carefully backed up my hard drive to the server and also to an external USB I banged in a Debian Squeeze Beta 2 CD and hit the big red button.
I did a basic install of Debian (with no software selection checked) and then installed LXDE as I detailed in The Writer’s PC and started installing applications and restoring the backed up data.
Whilst lxde looked beautiful on my PC I did find a few niggling problems….
Not mater what I tried, Chrome didn’t look right. I can’t really be more specific than that but it was as if the fonts didn’t fit.
Also, Gedit was excruciatingly slow and kept stuttering whilst I was working on large documents.
Furthermore, the panel at the bottom of the screen, although it looked lovely, was far more difficult to configure than the Gnome panel.
The system certainly was very, very fast though!
Conclusion
I persevered with the basic Debian/LXDE installation for just over a day.
Then I decided to call it quits.
I think that the final straw was that it locked up three times in a row without any warning. When I’m busy I even resent the time a reboot takes!
It wasn’t working for me and, although I’m sure I could have found way to sort out all the niggles, I just didn’t have the time.
It was back to Mint then?
Or should I take a detour and try out Mint Debian instead?
Well, that’s another story but I’ll close this one by saying that if you want a really fast (as in so fast you wouldn’t believe) PC, try installing Debian minial and then puting lxde on top of it.
Just don’t expect an out of the box experience like the sort you would get form installing Ubuntu, Suse or Mint.
I just didn’t have the time to sort out all of the niggling little problems that I encountered and, although none of them were exactly major, the all added up to a working environment that I was unhappy with.
I’ll certainly go back and try the same installation again, when I’ve got more time, but for now I’m off down a different track.
More news next week.
All the best
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January 21st, 2011 at 4:02 pm
A couple of lightweight programs you may want to try during your travels:
Torrent – RTorrent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTorrent
Audio – MOC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_on_Console
I have been enjoying the content, please keep it coming.
January 21st, 2011 at 8:25 pm
I went through the exact same process. I like Mint on our laptop shared with my wife, and Kubuntu on my workstation. The bonus is that I get to keep an eye on Gnome and KDE stuff. Nice blog!
January 21st, 2011 at 8:29 pm
I wanted also to recommend MOC, but I see Thumos already did so. MOC is distraction free, knows a lot of formats, you can create custom .m3u, and play even internet radio. Also you should try streamripper, great tool to save internet radio streams.
Just recently FocusWriter hit the sid repository – it is a nice alternative to PyRoom, has the option to save your text as ascii or .rtf, and if you don’t find this annoying, it has typewriter sounds!
Never tried Pan, I use Liferea Feed Reader, but I suppose I will check to see if Pan is faster than Liferea.
I am using aptosid (debian sid) xfce, so my default apps are different. But for writing, I use some old DOS era apps (BREEZE, CHIWRITER, AURORA) in DOSBox, PyRoom and Focus Writer, Abiword only when I am forced to, Celtx and Scrivener for Linux.
January 21st, 2011 at 9:03 pm
Why don’t you try PCLinuxOS LXDE? It always works out of the box, and is an awesome distro. Also, I think all of those apps are in the repository for PCLinuxOS.
Have fun!!!
January 21st, 2011 at 9:13 pm
Hi Meemaw – I’m pretty much died in the wool Debian (although I think what Mint are doing is amazing) – I’ve not tried PCLinuxOS LXDE et – perhaps I ought to take a look.
Of course, there is the LXDE Debian install to try out as well.
I have found something that suits quite nicely though – I’ll write about it t the end of the week once I’ve had time to do some analysis.
All the best
Keith
P.S. Thanks for your input Meemaw – I’ve learned so much from the comments here and at kmeckstein.com
P.P.S. Isn’t Steven J. Vaughan a big fan of PCLinusOS? I’m certainly a big fan of his.
January 21st, 2011 at 9:21 pm
Hi Scott
I used to be a big KDE fan (back in 2005/2206) but am now 100% Gnome.
I thought that lxde would be OK for my everyday machine – it is for my writing machine – but it just didn’t work out.
Glad you are enjoying the blog – I’ve got some interesting things coming up!
All the best
Keith
P.S. How good is Mint these days! When people (new Linux converts) tell me how wonderful Ubuntu is I don’t really like to tell them… “You ain’t seen nothing yet, mate! You ain’t seen nothing yet!”
January 21st, 2011 at 9:29 pm
OK Radcu
I’ll take a look at it tomorrow (it’s already Wine O’Clock here in rural France!)
I’ll also look at FocusWriter – I wouldn’t mind the typewriter sounds althogh I’m not sure if I want the formatting that RTF would give me?
I’ll have to take a look anyway – thanks for pointing it out.
All the best
Keith
P.S. Until 2006, a lot of my writing was done on a DOS PC running MS Word for DOS 6.0 – normally too ashamed to admit that!
P.P.S. I’m still proud to think of myself as a DOS guru! What I could do in Assembler and Quick C back in the day…..
P.P.P.S. Even though my PC is 50,000 times faster than my old DOS PC, even though my screen can display ten million more colours than my old DOS PC – I can still only type and think at the same speed as when I was using my old DOS PC (and could actually code an awfully lot quicker back in those days and generally be an awful lot more productive) – does this make me a throwback?
January 21st, 2011 at 11:15 pm
How about putting LXDE on top of LMDE?
January 22nd, 2011 at 2:41 am
I have found Crunchbang Statler (essentially squeeze with some added scripts, codecs and the like) with Xfce to be an excellent distro. It is lightning fast and fully compatible with debian’s repos. I too am adie-hard debian man and #! works out of the box with all my systems from my netbook (which boots in just under 20 seconds) to my AMD multi-core systems. Worth a look if you want a light weight minimal distro with minimal fuss.
January 22nd, 2011 at 3:54 am
Dude, if your system is locking up you may be having hardware problems. Don’t give up on Debian just yet.
Try running gnome instead of LXDE. I am using it with gnome on an old laptop and it is still fast.
January 22nd, 2011 at 6:46 am
My 2 cents concerning Linux Mint Debian.
I have been using it for a few months now on two different machines.
One is a 5 year old Dell Inspiron 6000 with a 1.7 Ghz Pentium M and 2 gigs of memory. It runs great on this laptop. I love it and I have no plans of changing.
The other is a 2 year old Acer Aspire One with a 1.7 Ghz Atom and 1.5 gigs of memory. Linux Mint Debian runs slow on this netbook. I am thinking of changing to something else on this machine.
If my memory is correct, I think you are talking about a machine with a 600 Mhz CPU with 256 of memory. Based on my experience with my netbook, I’m thinking you will not be happy and will have problems like you had with the Debian/LXDE install.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any suggestions for you as I haven’t really tried anything else a this time.
January 22nd, 2011 at 1:18 pm
Keith,
I suppose you are right about the .rtf formatting, I never used it, I’m used to save only as plain .txt…
As for DOS… if it weren’t Linux (I love debian/xfce!), I would probably install and use just a DOS/FreeDOS-like OS… I find it more friendly, quiet and simple.
January 22nd, 2011 at 8:25 pm
Those unfamiliar with Debian should know that there is much official and semi-official software for Debian Stable that is not available from the default install. Although once released Debian Stable does not change there is newer Debian-supported software for Stable, including both newer kernels and newer applications. Debian’s reputation for being “difficult” can probably be traced to having to manually enable access to such additional software, particularly the multi-media software, that many expect to have.
Details on the software available to Debian Stable users can be found at: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianSoftware
January 24th, 2011 at 3:49 am
Dear friend, why not use openbox with tint2?
you should try it out !
Arch; chrunchbang; or even debian with openbox by hand ! gl
February 3rd, 2011 at 5:26 am
Too bad you did not try Debian Squeeze with Gnome.
It is fast, and has not locked-up on me or crashed in use.
And it is not resource hungry.
But to each his own. Mint is OK. (By the way I use 64bit Debian).
If you want to experiment with new technology, and stable stuff at that, try Fedora.