How to save memory

This page is meant as a collection of information on how to save memory to make Linux work reasonable on older system with limited amount of RAM.

Streamlining the desktop environment

The common Desktop environments GNOME and KDE are - in their modern state - focused more on features, integration and beauty than on resource saving. Understandable. But running Linux on an older ThinkPad with limited RAM requires concious and sensitive resource usage more than anything else. The good thing about Linux is that a lot of things stay adjustable and costumizable. So lets see what we can do about desktops.

alternative Desktop Environments

First of all, it is important to notice that GNOME and KDE are not the only Desktop Environments around. The third most famous one is probably XFCE. It is much lighter in terms of resource usage and still provides a complete desktop environment including file manager, panel and so on. But also, some Window Managers exceed the task of managing windows towards providing a funcional workbench. As such are:

• the NextStep alike ones
  • WindowMaker (probably the most widespread NextStep like WM)
  • Afterstep (another one of those)
  • BlackBox
  • FluxBox (tabbed windows, lighweight)
  • PekWM (kind of a one man show, but feature rich and extremely customizable)
• others
  • Golem
  • IceWM (lightweight, widespread)
  • LarsWM (unique tiling Window Manager)

GNOME

Its like with humans, the worst feature is in most cases also the best one. For GNOME it is probably the many little parts it consists of. Makes it hard to install, but enables one to customize the installation. So, the first thing you should do to streamline GNOME is not to launch it. Sounds stupid? Well, lets have a look.

GNOME is basically a set of libraries built around the GTK+ libs and extending its functionality. Add some nice little applications, a session manager, a panel, beautiful icons and some other stuff and you have GNOME as you know it. Reversing those additions is what you can do to use GNOME applications on a machine that this desktop environment would normally take your nerves on.

The GNOME panel, the session manager, the desktop manager and the window manager are all parts of GNOME that eat a lot of memory for something that others can do in a maybe little less beautiful but much more resource saving way. So first of configure your login manager not to use launch gnome-session at login. If you are using GDM this is quite straight forward, you just need to add a different session script, launching your favorite window manager. See the list above and pick one, lets say i.e. WindowMaker. WindowMaker uses a desktop menu, a dock and a notification area to provide you with an organized way of launching applications and iconfying running ones. So we don't need a panel anymore. Also, think if you really need icons on your desktop. If you do, think about using something like ROX filer instead of nautilus for that. In any case, tell nautilus not to manage the desktop by default by unchecking the according setting within gconf-editor. To keep GNOME applications happy we would need to have gconf and gnome-settings-manager running at every session start. One way to do this is to either include them in your new session script. They both need to be running to make GNOME applications realize their settings properly.