Hello there!
I'm having a little problem. I have AntiX on 2 PCs :
1) My PC with AMD Sempron 1,6 GHz, 1GB RAM, nVidia FX 6200 card, 80Gb Samsung HDD
2) Mi girlfriend's PC with Intel (I can't remember which) with 800MHz, 256 RAM, and GeForce2 MX/MX 400 video card...

So on my PC AntiX is working great, I can easily surf the web, listen to music, play World of Warcraft, and everything works just great. But my girlfriend's PC is working pretty hard... It's enough to download smth with Transmission and system works veery slow, I listen to music at her PC and I can open just 2 tabs in Iceweasel, because more tabs will make my work horrible... When I was translating the main page I have red that AntiX will need 128 Mb RAM for a comfortable work, but practice showed me different amounts.
And I want to ask: how to remove startup applications or process and wich I should remove for a comfortable work for a simple user?
All she is doing:
* Surfs the web, and playing flash games in the browser, sometimes watching youtube
* Watch movies
* Chatting with Pidgin
* Listen to music with Audacious
* Downloading torrents with Transmission.
* Windows manager is xfce4

Maybe there is a way to optimize system just for this needs?
Thank you, will wait for any help.

P.S. Sorry for bad English

I have a pc very similar to yours (not yours girlfriend's). I have four tabs opened in icewesel and VLC media player playing an online radio: 133 RAM used and less than 10% of the CPU.

Some observations:
- I imagine Xfce will use more resources than IceWM, FluxBox or even LXDE. But then she would have to like the look and feel of the lighter window managers.
- Iceweasel has many features and, while being not a resource hog, it still uses some RAM. Also flash movies uses 100% CPU power even on my machine (Athlon XP+ 1700 - 1466 MHz).
- So for the above I suggest installing noscript and Adblock Plus addons. With that you'll have flash and javascript blocked. Adblock Plus is newbie friendly: it makes browsing faster and even more good looking. Noscript is more geekie but is a must for low powered computers. One has to understand that most of the time there's no need to allow javascript for sites and then after allowing for the most commonly used sites it's easier to manage.
- This I found recently: set iceweasel to block cookies from sites (under Preferences > Privacy) and then allow only for the sites she needs (press ctrl-i > Permissions and set it to 'allow' or 'allow for session').
- Make sure she has a swap partition with 512 MB.
- Open rcconf as root (or open antiX Control Center > System >Choose Services) and disable whatever services you don't use. See
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"antix.freeforu ms.org/post12814.html#p12814"
linktext was:"this topic"
====================================
. Reboot to make effect.

I also remove some apps that come with antiX that I don't use (things like wireless, scanner, bluetooth and printer). That also saves (not much) space on disk.
If she starts to use antiX's default IceWM or Fluxbox then you must comment or remove the entry for Wicd at IceWM and Fluxbox startup files as this will save some RAM. Check in Xfce's control panel where to disable applications to start automatically too.

At last, you may want to try the smxi script.At GRUB's menu screen type 3 and antiX will boot to the command line, log in as root, type smxi and follow the prompts. It can update the system, remove unused things (like kernel wl - wireless - modules; bluetooth and wireless applications etc.), do apt-clean or apt-autoclean or remove left-over configurations and also install the nVidia 71.xx.xx driver for her GF2 card (I'm not sure but I think so).
If you use smxi do this: every time you use it, after it's completed, reboot (don't go to the desktop). It's not necessary but I see that when it reboots it comes up using less memory (and that keeps for the other boots).

I had an old laptop (>10 years old) with 256 RAM and Antix ran fine in it, and I was even able to use Transmission for torrents and watch videos. However, I was only using fluxbox. I suspect, like secipolla, that xfce might just be consuming too many resources. At least, it worth a try on your end. Just log in to fluxbox (or IceWM) and see if you still have the same problems.

Pedro

Thank you for your help. I disabled startup"junk" like cups, bluetooth and others, installed Adblock and noscript and made something with smxi)) Helped) And I wanted to ask. Which one I should trust:
* The conky's monitor of RAM
* Or free -m monitor?
There is different amounts.

Thanks again.
P.S. Sorry for bad English

Got problem with smxi on my PC...
$ su
Password:
# init 3
# smxi
/usr/local/bin/smxi: line 1: syntax error near unexpected token `newline'
/usr/local/bin/smxi: line 1: `<!-------------------------------------------------------------------->'

Ensifer,

If you want to use smxi, secipolla was referring to booting up to add a 3 at the end of the boot code, if you are already up and running,
you need to do:

ctrl-alt-f1
root
(enter your root password)
smxi

cheers,
oldhoghead

In the install-packages option of smxi there's swiftfox browser, you could try it (it's Firefox built according with different kinds of CPU's).

Also something that's good to have is a list in /etc/hosts for nonsense sites (the system reads the list and don't even connect to them). I always get it from
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://msmvps.com/blogs/hostsnews/default.aspx"
linktext was:"here"
====================================
.

To be easier I'm uploading the file for you. Uncompress and put in /etc/hosts (or copy the contents).

Thank you, secipolla. Your advices are really good and usefull)

oldhoghead, loaded to '3' option, the xserver didn't started at all,I logged in as root but i have same error.

There must be something wrong with your smxi script.

Follow the instructions here to get a new one.


========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://smxi.org/site/install.htm"
linktext was:"http://smxi.org/site/install.htm"
====================================
" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false

You may want to install it again directly from the site. Boot to level 3, log in as root and:
Installing with smxi.zip

I'll start with the easiest. Download and extract the smxi.zip package. This requires the unzip utility. So first let's check if you have it:

# type this command:
which unzip

# if it gives you an answer, you have it.
# If nothing happens when you do that, just do this:
apt-get update && apt-get install unzip

# or, if you prefer aptitude, do:
aptitude update && aptitude install unzip

(antiX already has unzip)
Ok, so now we're ready to get the file, which contains smxi, svmi, and sgfxi.

# as root, run the following command
cd /usr/local/bin && wget -Nc smxi.org/smxi.zip && unzip smxi.zip && smxi

If everything worked as expected, it should, if you are X (KDE, Gnome, etc), ask if you want to turn off X and start again.
(you won't be in X)

This method installs smxi, svmi, and sgfxi, all ready to go.


========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://smxi.org/site/install.htm"
linktext was:"http://smxi.org/site/install.htm"
====================================
" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false

If you don't need wicd for wireless (maybe you have wired or ceni connects for you) then you can remove it. This will save you a few RAM.

You may also want to use the fast boot option. ie using insserv/sysv-rc That may need a bit of work, but it is safe.

The test version of antiX 8.5 comes with Iceweasel 3.5.4 already but for your installed systems it can be interesting to install swiftfox with smxi (it's version 3.5.5). If you do, then un-install Iceweasel afterwords.

Firefox 3.5 and it's derivatives allows to enable and disable flash without needing to restart the browser. So you just leave it disabled and if you want it in some site, you click Tools > Addons and enable Shockwave flash in the plugins tab then reload the page (F5).
That's important because if some site has, for example, wmv (Windows Media Video) and Flash then it won't automatically select to play with the flash player. The same video playing with the mplayer plugin uses far less cpu resources than with the flash plugin.

Thank you, guys for your tips)