A Modern, Low Resources Linux Distribution and All the Real Reasons Why We Need It

GNU/Linux distributions keep improving at
a very fast pace. Every release adds support for new hardware, new
features and security improvements, both for server and desktop
applications.Unfortunately, this triumphant march has a pretty big down
side. Although excellent software can be obtained freely, hardware
never will be. Up-to-date, full-featured Linux applications,
especially desktop ones, require almost as much hardware resources
as proprietary ones.Of course, everybody pretending to start serious video
editing with a computer more than two years old should really
change his mind, regardless of the operating system he happens to
run. The problem is that even system administrators and experienced
desktop users often find that the same things they were doing
yesterday become slower after an upgrade. If your CPU is 20 times
faster than ten years ago, why does it often take the same amount
of time or even more to get from powering up to reading e-mail?
Even, people with only obsolete computers available and who have
limited programming knowledge are almost forbidden from entering
the "Free" Software world.Want the real reasons why
this is a serious problem? Read on.EconomicsThe standard attitude about unnecessarily heavy programs is
"why should we care when desktop hardware is as cheap as it is
today?". An example is
this
strategy letter, which, among other things, says, "I don't
think anyone will deny that on today's overpowered, under-priced
computers, loading a huge program is still faster than loading a
small program was even 5 years ago. So what's the problem?"The problem is that (even when it's true) this is a
very limited and egotistic attitude: today's
computer's are "under-priced" only for 20% of the world population.
The rest still has to work many months or years to buy the stuff
that makes KDE or GNOME look fast.Even those with enough income to throw away a perfectly good,
working PC every two years should not be forced to do so if their
needs have not changed. Unfortunately, the two most frequent
answers that one hears when raising this issue are:

• "become a programmer and recompile/write from
  scratch yourself": snob answer, impossible in most cases.
• "use an old distro": why? Why should anyone use a
  kernel with limited firewalling capabilities, compiled with
  obsolete libraries? Why should anyone run the open door that
  Sendmail was some years ago?

Schools, families, developing countries, public and private
offices with almost null budget (pretty big segment nowadays) must
save on all costs, no matter how low they already are. Often, the
only PCs they can afford are donated and really old, and Free
Software can't leave them alone. Besides, homework, word processing
and spreadsheets don't need multimedia capabilities.Long-Term Survival of Free SoftwareDomination of all table and wireless desktops is crucial in
the long run. Whoever controls the majority of clients and
unexperienced users eventually enslaves all servers too, regardless
of quality.New Technologies (or, again, long term survival
of...)Don't think that reducing the hardware requirements of Free
Software confines it to die in some (big) obsolete hardware
graveyard. Actually, the opposite is true.Think of to all the new, low cost, internet appliances that
are restricted to being only that because being able to run a
current distribution would double their price. Even more important,
think mobile computing. We are all supposed to surf, compute and
produce wirelessly "real soon now" with really tiny boxes:
watch-sized PDAs, third-generation cell phones, whatever. If
mainstream Linux cleans up quickly its many
existing desktop applications, it will dominate this market before
the others finish saying "Hardware improves rapidly, let's just
wait until they make the Pentium IV as small as a
StrongArm."EcologyComputers are useful, cool and among the most polluting kinds
of domestic waste. They should be dumped (separately) only when
they physically break, not because Super OS 2002 is free but won't
run slower than one gigahertz.Culture and FreedomBasic desktop computing is quickly placing itself next to the
alphabet in the list of tools necessary to fully express oneself
and build one's destiny. As such, it must be free not only from
patents and licenses, as free as Free Speech, but it should also
cost (hardware included) as close to zero as possible.Equal opportunities is what Free Software is really about. I
feel bad whenever I hear Free Software programmers still saying,
"as long as I have the source and can program as I like, learn to
compile by yourself and don't bother me"--even to grade school kids
without money.A Low Resources Distribution OptionOf course, I'm not asking anybody to give up his
multi-everything desktop. The freedom to choose has always been our
strength. However, I really feel that we have many reasons to stop
for a moment, look at all the cool free software developed lately,
and make it "free, even if you don't need all of it or even if you
can't afford a pretty fast machine".I'm not even suggesting that we need to start yet one more
GNU/Linux distribution. As a matter of fact, advanced and very
valid projects that do this already exist, but they are all
practically limited to users with a lot of competence and spare
time to install, maintain or add packages.What we should do instead is make the base installs of
mainstream distributions less resource-hungry. That way, nobody
would be forced to change distros or buy more RAM because the new
version is twice as big. And any newbie with an old machine could
get started and find a lot of extant packages and
documentation.To make all this happen, I believe that some changes in the
current attitude of all parties involved (users, developers and
distribution packagers) are necessary.Users must learn to use computers productively and (be helped
to) start discriminating between real features and eyecandy.
Developers should start to realize the importance of what they are
doing, and make it easier to repackage their programs for low
resource environments.Above all, some changes of focus among packagers and
maintainers of installation programs is required. To begin with,
the install process should be as light as possible. I go nuts when
I think that I could build my very own kernel that will run in 8MB
of RAM, but only if I have 32MB for the installer that will put the
code and compiler inside the PC.The second thing that would really help is to have two
packaged versions of all the most common applications: one to be
used standalone, and another inside its original desktop
environment. For example, one standard Konqueror for KDE
and a stripped, statically linked version with
all plug-ins if you have no other use for QT and KDE.The same applies to graphical configuration tools. They can
be very helpful for a newbie, but many of them require at least
GTK, QT and often some other GNOME/KDE piece. The reason is,
without those toolkits and libraries, building such tools would
have been much heavier.I completely agree with that setup, but I can't help but
notice that the current packaging means that to reconfigure your
firewall, for example you have to add many megabytes of stuff in
order to avoid tons of dependency-failed messages.Compiling and packaging all these things as monolithic
binaries would give back to the user almost 50% of the capacity of
an old hard disk, without any real performance loss (for occasional
use on low RAM computers, at least). Note that such space savings
are decisive for the success of an installation on obsolete
hardware.Once these prerequisites are satisfied, we would have all the
building blocks for a predefined "Basic Desktop/Server" install
option or, more exactly, three sub-options:

• bare system, where bare means kernel, package
  manager and networking support. It should take not more than one
  hundred megs, possibly less.
• text-only desktop: bare plus SMTP server, GPG, ssh,
  e-mail client, browser and text editor.
• Full GUI desktop: all of the above, plus one or two
  graphical applications for desktop use, possibly not depending on
  GNOME/KDE, or at least packaged as explained above.

Choosing the second or third sub-option should give you,
without other efforts, one or two tools for each normal desktop
task.What follows in this article is a partial list of
applications that are in no particular order, partly based on my
personal experience, and partly on what I've read across the Net,
that should be included in the low resource distribution.Please keep in mind that I am not a C/C++ programmer, so look
first at the functionalities defined as necessary, and then look at
specific solutions that I suggest. It is entirely possible that
some of them are not practically feasible or just plain wrong.
Please let me know when this is the case and suggest
alternatives.The common denominator behind everything that follows is my
belief that all users, including newbies, who need to run GNU/Linux
software on an obsolete PC should go mostly for character-based
applications and not feel sorry for that, as long as they can still
do quickly everything they need. There is nothing intrinsically bad
in full GUI programs, but, at least in this context, they might
just make the problem worse.System:

• kernel capable of iptables filtering and
  journaling, but without support of exotic filesystems or all
  possible types of protocols, with swap usage and other relevant
  settings tuned specifically for limited RAM;
• xinetd/iptables set up to allow only web browsing
  (not serving), ssh, e-mail, FTP and Telnet. Of course, by FTP and
  Telnet we mean the client applications only, and by e-mail we mean
  simply sending outgoing messages to one's ISP servers and
  retrieving messages from them.
  In other words, an iptables firewall script written for
  typical SOHO use should be provided: dial up on ppp0, trusted
  interface on eth0, unlimited traffic on the internal network, ppp0
  only accepts HTTP, FTP, e-mail and a few others clients inside the
  PC.
• XAsk to add pop-up menus to shell scripts, so that
  full GUI-based interaction with the system doesn't necessarily
  require a full desktop environment
• CDBKup to backup whole directories on CD-ROM
• No font server
• TinyX X server instead of X11. An alternative way
  to look at multiple windows simultaneously at a high resolution;
  could be framebuffer or SVGAText coupled with the character window
  manager TWIN.
• GPG (of course, at least for digital
  signatures)
• AIDE (GPL alternative to Tripwire)

Window Manager: Blackbox
with bbtools, all preconfigured to be fully usable without the
mouse.Internet Connection: shell
scripts attached to the root menu, instead of graphical or
distro-specific tools.E-Mail: Mutt, light
(text-based, but e-mail is text) and more
capable than you will ever need; configured by default for digital
signature. To retrieve e-mail, procmail with Tk-RED recipe
generator, fetchmail and one of the several tools that can be
driven from Mutt to cancel unwanted e-mail on the server instead of
downloading it, popfilter, popsneaker or animail. To send e-mail,
ssmtp (or postfix), configured at install time to just send to your
ISP and answer to fetchmail.Browsing: wget, w3m and
choice among Galeon, Skipstone or Konqueror, packaged as above.
Actually, it would be interesting to port the embedded version of
Konqueror back on old Intel processors and see what happens. The
Dillo browser also sounds very attractive in this context.Printing: pdq instead of
lpd; full Postscript support, but not through Tex/Latex, and
packaged in such a way that doesn't force you to install every
possible font on the planet.Fax: shell script-based on
fax/efax, with cover support, TCL/TK front-end to enter file
location (disk or scanner) and phone number.Scanning: Sane, of course,
packaged in a script attached to the root menu when you just need
to dump something to your home directory or with its Xsane graphic
interface.File Manager: midnight
commander and ROX; yes, I know that although real men do it with
just the prompt and the find command, but in order to sort the
photos of all your vacations you do need a GUI file manager. ROX,
with its thumbnail option and all the other real features, does the
job well.Text Editing: basic vi for
system administration when everything else fails, choice between
GNU EMACs (repackaged to occupy less disk space and with the
chapter numbering and HTML generation capabilities provided by Jari
Aalto's tinytf package) and vim for more sophisticated use. Of
course, both EMACs and vim should have full colour support even in
console mode.Productivity: for normal
needs, AbiWord, SIAG and MagicPoint for simple presentations. If
opening *that kind of file* is necessary, OpenOffice--not
lightweight by any means (not yet at least) but the best solution
around; in RPM or DEB form, installed in a system directory
according to the LSB.Small Business Tools: let's
help small business owners too: packages for accounting, inventory,
medical records, pizza ordering systems and so on. Of course these
should be available and listed for the user's choice, not all
installed by default.We Are Working on ItAfter many discussions on the Red Hat Enigma mailing list
(and on several others) others and myself have just started the
RULE project (Run Up2date Linux Everywhere), which aims to add an
installation option modeled according to these guidelines to
standard Red Hat Linux.The RULE
home page (this is the URL while I'm writing, but it will
change soon) is always linked from
the project
site. The FAQ also explains why the project is Red
Hat-based and why and how even users of other distributions can
benefit from (and help) RULE. Please visit us, and subscribe to the
RULE mailing list if interested.ConclusionAdvanced, text-based configuration with vi is a user space
task, and I think everybody should (be helped to) learn it:
programming from scratch is different. Users deserve more than the
forced choice between becoming programmers from the very first
moment and spending unnecessary money to use "Free" Software. I
encourage you to try all the tools I mention, if you don't know
them yet. The home pages of some of the least known ones are listed
below. Run them for a while and, if it's needed and you know how to
do it, put them in your distribution packaging format and make them
available. Even on more powerful machines, doing more, faster, with
less, can be lots of fun.ResourcesHome pages of some of the least known applications:AIDE:
www.cs.tut.fi/~rammer/aide.htmlANIMAIL:
www.clickeas.com/linux/animail_en.htmlDILLO:
dillo.sourceforge.net/MAGICPOINT:
www.Mew.org/mgp/POPFILTER:
web.tiscali.it/marco_web/popfilter.htmlPOPSNEAKER:
www.ixtools.de/popsneakerROX:
rox.sourceforge.netTINYTF:
poboxes.com/jari.aaltoTK-RED:
www.naskita.com/linux/tk-red/tk-red.shtmlTWIN:
linuz.sns.it/~max/twinXask:
www.hdk-berlin.de/~rasca/xask

email: linuxdesk@inwind.it