LXDE on Fedora 11 Diskless Machine

I have a five year old machine without a hard disk which I boot using a liveusb.

I have been creating a custom livecd by adding a multimedia components from the rpmfusion repository. I decided to explore the option of lxde on the liveusb after reading an article on Lubuntu in Linux Magazine. I modified the fedora-livecd-multimedia.ks replacing @gnome-desktop group by @LXDE group. As before, I retained mplayer and the gstreamer bad and ugly plugins.

The creation of the livecd and the liveusb was smoothe.

Booting created one problem. Instead of gdm, slim was used as a simple login manager, which would not give me the option to switch from gnome-session to LXDE session. I just created a file /home/liveuser/.xinitrc with one line -
startlxde

That was it.

Anyway, I normally use this machine in init 3 setting, and usually use it start a remote X session on my main desktop.

Icewm is restrictive. Advantages of XFCE has been diminishing as it has become more functional. So, LXDE does seem to be a very good compromise. I am now also using it as the default session for remote X sessions. The snappiness of the desktop is impressive and ideal for the work I do from the diskless machine.

Fedora 11 - the initial startup experience

The boot time is supposed to be faster. But what matters is what I would see on my system. I checked twice to confirm.

From the grub screen to the display of gdm screen with the same services:

1. Fedora 10: 1 minute 25 sec
2. Fedora 11: 1 minute 15-20 sec

Visible difference will come if the X is started asap and the services get started in the background.

Signing in to the startup sound on KDE:
1. Fedora 10: 35 or so sec
2. Fedora 11: 40 or so sec

So, the usable state of my system continues to be around 2 minutes. This may become longer whenever an fsck on a file system is needed.

For gnome, the signing in time has come down from approx 20 sec to 15 sec. Even then, the effective time for being able to use the system is over 90 sec.

Bringing up the network connections takes time. So, may be switching to network manager may shave a few more seconds.

Using icewm, the signing on time reduces to 5 sec though it takes time for the menu items to show up.

XFCE4 is usable in 10 to 15 sec.