complete GNU-software gentoo-laptop and lightweight programms

by schischa

Buying a new harddisk with 5400rpm for my IBM Thinkpad X31 replacing the 4200rpm one I had to decide wether simply copying it with dd or reinstalling the whole system. Just copying it is the easiest way and in fact I had _no_ problems with my gentoo installation but there are some points why I decided to make a completely fresh install:

1. I wanted to try -* USE-flags with package based flags in /etc/portage/package.use so there are only packages I really need
2. I already had every config I would need, especially kernelconfig and xorg.conf so there won’t be much configuring work needed to be done
3. experimenting a lot on the system I was quite sure there were at least some packages I wouldn’t need as I already tried running KDE, GNOME and finally Openbox without any “complete” desktop environment and crappy things like graphical login managers ;)
4. >500 packages seemed to be quite a lot on my laptop as my workstation running KDE+beryl has about 600…
5. in the end it would be save to try installing it this way because I always could just change it to my old running system as I won’t delete it on the old harddisk till the new “minimal” system is running

I won’t explain every step on my way, my aim is to present the software I found on my way to a minimal productive system without limitting the range of functions.

First thing was to change the make.conf as I like running an unstable/testing system. I haven’t experienced problems with that so I added ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=”~x86″ to it. Much more important was the next step: adding -* to the USE-flags. As I said my primary aim was setting up USE-flags on a per-package-basis via package.use. Thinking about it there are in fact some USE-flags which still can be set globally activating CPU-features like mmx oder 3dnow. As my thinkpad has a pentium-m i my USE-flags finally were:

USE=”-* mmx nls nptl nptlonly sse sse2 unicode”

Unicode and nls aren’t affecting CPU-features but I recommend setting them nontheless as Unicode support is preferable on most systems…

After installing the base gentoo system and booting it for the first time I suggest doing an “emerge -pve world” and “emerge -pve system” to see which USE-flags would be affected at the moment by the flags, as there are still no per package flags set in package.use. As I didn’t find anything special I needed except wget with ssl, the only thing I did was:

# echo “net-misc/wget ssl” >> /etc/portage/package.use

I suggest doing an emerge -ev system and world at this point for haveing a system with the useflags set enabled. After that run “emerge -av –depclean” to remove packages that aren’t needed any more.

Next step was setting up X which was quite easy already having my xorg.conf on the other harddisk :) Emerging it I needed to set some useflags in package.use as I wanted DRI. As xorg also includes dependencies like xclock and xterm or twm I wanted to get rid of that (I just don’t need it) but in the end I resigned as I didn’t want to edit ebuilds all the time and there is no other way. If you are willing to do that kind of extra work, do it, I wanted to have a running system without editing ebuilds except it was absolutely necessary.

X and GUI software

By now the only thing I did was searching for adequate software. I tried to avoid qt applications and kde/gnome apps as most of them bring in a huge amount of dependencies like kdelibs or half of the gnome package. Here is the list of programms I chose and use. Everyone should do the work it’s supposed to do quite well and till now I don’t miss a thing. I didn’t list things like firefox, thunderbird, and openoffice as they are well known and don’t produce unecessary deps. All programms are extremely lightweight and very fast and don’t lack in funcionality.

Imageviewer: mirage
PDF-reader: epdfview
Text-editor: tea
Filemanager: rox
Sysmonitor: conky
Pager: netwmpager
Terminal: urxvt
Image-editing: gimp

Additional Software:

I also think it might be useful to mention software like pypanel and xchat. Both are very nice if you like having a panel or a graphical IRC client and are lightweight and have many dependencies. One really nice programm I found on my way through portage was Gliv. It’s an imageviewer which uses opengl to render images (try it, its really nice). I liked to use it but its getting kind of slow watching pictures >1mb with the radeon7000 in my laptop so I had to switch to mirage. If your GPU is a little faster (not very hard indeed :P ) you will like it.
If you need a “full” music player you should take look at Exaile. It’s an GTK based amarok clone and quite nice. Another nice app if you need or like a graphical archiving tool is archive.

Conclusion:

I think it was a good decision making a fresh gentoo install. I have about 320 packages now and can do most things I need with my laptop. In fact I don’t miss any functionality atm. One thing I feared was setting the useflags manually could be a lot of work but it was _really_ easy. If you download the package.use you will see that it counts only about 20 entries.

For those who are interested, here are some config files I created. The package.use and rox.conf for example and screenshots of the programs. Conky and netwmpager are seen on nearly every screenshot so I didn’t make seperate ones for them:

Screenshots: