LXDE

I wanted the LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment) on my laptop. I used the system monitor (System > Administration > System Tools > System Monitor) in GNOME, XFCE, and LXDE to see which had the smallest footprint in RAM. I salvaged a 512MB DDR ram from a similar laptop to bring the total RAM up to 768, which means this laptop only had 512MB of RAM before. Not running anything on start up, just a boot into the "vanilla" (nothing tweaked) operating system, LXDE used about 190 MB, XFCE used about 225 MB, and GNOME used about 280 MB. Considering that Firefox itself uses up about 90 MB of RAM without a bunch of flash going on I wanted to keep the RAM usage down a bit. So I went with LXDE. I honestly was surprised that it beat XFCE, which is touted as the lightweight distribution. To install on Jaunty was as simple as going into Synaptic and searching for LXDE. The tricky part was getting wireless to work because of the broadcom proprietary drivers. I got them working in gnome (see previous post), but for the drivers to be used in LXDE I needed to tell it to start the network manager on start up. To do so I just opened up a terminal and then entered the following command at the prompt:

sudo leafpad /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/autostart

Then after entering my password at the sudo prompt I added the following line to my autostart file:

@nm-applet

So now the network-manager applet starts with the desktop environment, and wireless works in LXDE for me.