Re: [Rule-list] Suggestion for modifying XFree86 and Tiny X

[Bill Crawford]

On Wed, 20 Mar 2002, Eugene Wong wrote:

> I do eliminate some of the unused tty's, and I want it to be manual. I'll 
> try and give a more specific example. Regular command line interfaces will 
> run on f1, f2, and f3. When I type startx [or whatever] because I feel like 
> surfing the Internet, XFree86 starts up on f4, right? Well, let's say that 
> I'm doing something on f1, but I am not finished yet. I'll type startx [or 
> whatever], but the "focus" will still remain on f1. I'm finished my work. 
> Now I switch to f4. XFree86 is all ready to go. I finish surfing the 
> Internet, but want to listen to some Real Audio music. So I play it, and 
> switch back to f1 to do some other task. XFree86 is still running on f4 and 
> f1 is still running the command line interface. During this entire time, f2 
> & f3 were busy running whatever programs.

 I don't quite see where you've got this hangup about the console and
X ... you can switch away to the console anytime you want.  I do this
often.  And it should behave more or less as you want.

 If you "startx" and wait just a second or two, you should see the X
background appear.  Any time after that you can switch back to another
virtual terminal and carry on with what you were doing there.

 If it's any help, using a lighter window manager will let the desktop
start up faster, and switching away from it and back will be quicker
if there's less memory used.  From experience I'd recommend fvwm2 if
that does enough for you, or WindowMaker which is slightly "heavier"
(but not much) and works quite will "standalone" without GNOME or KDE
(which will also save you some memory).

 I wasn't too clear on what hardware you're using.  Are you very short
of memory or is it just "slow" because of an older CPU?