Hello everyone
I am using xfce and I like it
I am looking for lightweight applications for the following
-Looking email over imap. Something that will not mess with my thunderbird at work.
-Pdf reader
-Flash player, if any
-Writing and previewing latex documents
-Skype client
What are your tips ?
Regards
Alex
Hi Alex,
I’m not sure how lightweight you want your applications to be, but some things you’ve asked really have not choice but the mainstream option (e.g. Flash player). By lightweight, I assume you mean to run in a console terminal because it doesn’t get more lightweight than that! I’m not too familiar with the native XFCE apps, but you may wish to check Xfce Wiki - recommendedapps .
An X GTK+ option is Claw Mail. Alpine is better. Mutt is the best of all.
I think you really need X for that. Epdfview and Xpdf are basic PDF viewers. There is very good but no-so-lightweight option from KDE called Okular. If you really insist on a console application, you could use pdftohtml and view the result in Lynx.
I know of no alternative.
For writing LaTeX documents, you can just use text editor, but your choice will depend on how advanced you are. I use Vim (with vim-latex) but you may prefer Emacs. X-based (but still lightweight) equivalents are GVim and XEMacs. The not-so-light KDE option is Kile if you want an beginner-friendly IDE.
For previewing, you have no choice but to use X. If you’re already using Okular for PDFs, it’s also ideal for previewing DVI output of TeX/LaTeX files. The GNOME equivalent is Evince, but I’ve never tried it.
Ermmm… Skype? I know of no other alternatives on Linux.
HTH
On 2012-11-30 12:16, alaios wrote:
>
> Hello everyone
> I am using xfce and I like it
>
> I am looking for lightweight applications for the following
>
> -Looking email over imap. Something that will not mess with my
> thunderbird at work.
Alpine. Mutt was called “Pine on steroids”, I personally don’t like it much.
Note: Alpine does not cache locally emails, every time you look at a
post again, it downloads it again. You need a good network. On the other
hand, thunderbird caches all emails, read or not.
But define “messing with thunderbird”, because imap was created for
collaboration: the email that you read at home will be tagged read at
work, too.
> -Pdf reader
xpdf, gv, evince, okular…
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
Sacrilege! 
I knew that Alpine was based on Pine, but I didn’t think Mutt was at all. You can set mutt however to cache emails in local folders (in your ~/.muttrc). The only difficulties I’ve had with Mutt is in forwarding attachments, but configuring the MIME forwarding entries does help.
Hello. I am using xfce as well. So hopefully I can help.
-Looking email over imap. Something that will not mess with my thunderbird at work.
I usually use Seamonkey browser since it has built in email client. Though something standalone you might try claws mail.
-Pdf reader
I use epdfview.
-Skype client
Skype. As it needs to be running to use alternate client anyway as far as I know.
On 2012-11-30 17:46, flymail wrote:
>
> robin_listas;2507826 Wrote:
>>
>> Alpine. Mutt was called “Pine on steroids”, I personally don’t like it
>> much.
>>
>
> 
Sacrilege! 
>
> I knew that Alpine was based on Pine, but I didn’t think Mutt was at
> all.
No, no, they are not based one on the other, no. However, that saying
above does exist meaning that mutt is like a much more powerful and
customizable Pine aka Alpine
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
For LaTeX the LyX 2 frontend is very undemanding while editing, particularly if you close the LaTeX code viewer rather than expecting it continuously to update while you are editing. I normally only open it when I hit a problem I cannot diagnose in LyX.
You can edit the LyX preferences to use ePDFview or whatever lightweight PDF reader you choose. The demands in Kile or LyX come when you ask LaTeX to compile for whatever reason.
Hi again I tried installing lyx2 in my system. (well could not find something like lyx2 but lyx). For that installation I have to download 300+ Mb and the installation will take 925Mb of space. Is this normal? I find it quite a lot. IF is normal though I will proceed.
Regards
Alex
It depends on how many of the other dependencies you presently don’t have installed already (e.g. TeXLive) - they should be listed in Yast (or sudo zypper install lyx) before you install. If you haven’t installed LaTeX, then yes I can imagine it taking up quite a lot of space. I already have a LaTeX install, and in my hands Lyx would additionally require clisp, libpq5, xindy, and xindy-rules using up an additional 102.1 MiB, which would mean IMO that Lyx not a lightweight application.
On 2012-12-04 15:36, alaios wrote:
> Hi again I tried installing lyx2 in my system. (well could not find
> something like lyx2 but lyx). For that installation I have to download
> 300+ Mb and the installation will take 925Mb of space. Is this normal? I
> find it quite a lot. IF is normal though I will proceed.
It depends on what you have already installed. You probably need to
install latex. Maybe it brings in parts of kde if you install the kde
flavour of lyx.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
Am 04.12.2012 16:06, schrieb flymail:
> which would mean IMO that Lyx not a lightweight
> application.
Honestly I do not see consumption of disk space as a criteria for light
weight or not, esp. not given the use case of the original post.
The question is not what applications consume less disk space but more
what applications do run on a weak machine without being too demanding
on the cpu/gpu and memory consumption.
I admit that does not become absolutely clear in this thread, but given
the other threads alois opened about light applications it becomes more
clear.
I just wanted to add this observation here.
–
PC: oS 12.2 x86_64 | i7-2600@3.40GHz | 16GB | KDE 4.8.5 | GTX 650 Ti
ThinkPad E320: oS 12.2 x86_64 | i3@2.30GHz | 8GB | KDE 4.9.3 | HD 3000
eCAFE 800: oS 11.4 i586 | AMD Geode LX 800@500MHz | 512MB | lamp server
TeXLive plus all the other programs that LyX calls, like ImageMagick, make the full installation over half a gigabyte but what I was referring to was the amount of RAM LyX uses under normal working conditions. Unless you are a full time typesetter producing a very wide range of publications for a very wide range of demanding clients you are unlikely to use more than a handful of the programs in the TexLive distribution but it is likely that the handful you use will be different from the handful your friend uses. It’s the old ratio, 80% of users only use 20% of the functions, except with LyX it is probably closer to 90% of users only use 10% of the functions.
To give you an idea of how lightweight LyX is I have had two documents each of over 100,000 words open in LyX and been able to work on them side by side whereas any of the office applications would struggle to allow you to work with any ease on one document that long.
And by side to side I do mean two different documents in a split window so that I could see them side by side!
You are of course correct. One could argue it’s like measuring a distro’s popularity using DistroWatch. That however doesn’t make it completely useless. For example, please observe the following:
dhcppc0:/ # zypper info vim
Loading repository data...
Reading installed packages...
Information for package vim:
Repository: @System
Name: vim
Version: 7.3-6.7.1
Arch: x86_64
Vendor: openSUSE
Installed: Yes
Status: up-to-date
Installed Size: 1.8 MiB
Summary: Vi IMproved
Description:
Vim (Vi IMproved) is an almost compatible version of the UNIX editor
vi. Almost every possible command can be performed using only ASCII
characters. Only the 'Q' command is missing (you do not need it). Many
new features have been added: multilevel undo, command line history,
file name completion, block operations, and editing of binary data.
Vi is available for the AMIGA, MS-DOS, Windows NT, and various versions
of UNIX.
For SUSE Linux, Vim is used as /usr/bin/vi.
Package vim contains the normal version of vim. To get the full runtime
environment install additionally vim-data.
dhcppc0:/ # zypper info lyx
Loading repository data...
Reading installed packages...
Information for package lyx:
Repository: openSUSE-11.4-Oss
Name: lyx
Version: 1.6.9-2.7
Arch: x86_64
Vendor: openSUSE
Installed: No
Status: not installed
Installed Size: 40.3 MiB
Summary: LaTeX-Based WYSIWYG Editor
Description:
LyX is a front-end for LaTeX under X11. It combines the comfortable use
of a word processor with the high quality of LaTeX typesetting.
Documents are displayed in a WYSIWYG-like way. User does not choose low
level attributes ("large italic") but high level layouts (styles) for
each paragraph. Of course, low level formatting is still possible.
So the base package of Lyx takes up 40.3 MiB, whereas the equivalent for Vim is 1.8 MiB. Based on these metrics, I believe it is highly improbable that Lyx constitutes the more lightweight option.
On 2012-12-05 01:36, flymail wrote:
> So the base package of Lyx takes up 40.3 MiB, whereas the equivalent
> for Vim is 1.8 MiB. Based on these metrics, I believe it is highly
> improbable that Lyx constitutes the more lightweight option.
Compare to LibreOffice instead.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding you. Are you suggesting that LibreOffice is `Lightweight?’ Have you tried installing LibreOffice by compiling from source?
On 2012-12-06 02:06, flymail wrote:
>
> robin_listas;2508579 Wrote:
>>
>> Compare to LibreOffice instead.
>>
>
> Perhaps I’m misunderstanding you. Are you suggesting that LibreOffice
> is `Lightweight?’
No, You are saying that lyx is heavy, and I say it is not. LO is heavy.
> Have you tried installing LibreOffice by compiling
> from source?
Actually, I think I did, a decade ago. Or something similar, that filled
my partition and crashed my system.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
No, I am not saying that Lyx is heavy, I’m just saying it isn’t lightweight.
On 2012-12-06 16:46, flymail wrote:
>
> robin_listas;2508844 Wrote:
>>
>>
>> No, You are saying that lyx is heavy, and I say it is not. LO is heavy.
>>
>>
>
> No, I am not saying that Lyx is heavy, I’m just saying it isn’t
> lightweight.
For a graphical editor, on the WYSIWYG class (or rather WYMIWYG), I find
it light and fast.
Huh, the packed sources weight only 8 megas…
And the rpm weights 45. Libreoffice is 277 the main package, you need a
dozen…
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
On 2012-12-09 13:08, Carlos E. R. wrote:
> On 2012-12-06 16:46, flymail wrote:
>>
>> robin_listas;2508844 Wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> No, You are saying that lyx is heavy, and I say it is not. LO is heavy.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> No, I am not saying that Lyx is heavy, I’m just saying it isn’t
>> lightweight.
>
> For a graphical editor, on the WYSIWYG class (or rather WYMIWYG), I find
> it light and fast.
Look, programs sorted by memory ussage, see where LyX is…
> PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
> 7311 cer 20 0 1819m 609m 25m S 1 7.6 73:48.93 firefox
> 7308 cer 20 0 1723m 517m 22m S 0 6.5 35:19.21 thunderbird-bin
> 7166 root 20 0 445m 253m 14m S 2 3.2 105:21.06 Xorg
> 4948 vscan 20 0 615m 146m 892 S 0 1.8 1:15.17 clamd
> 2016 cer 20 0 870m 110m 17m S 3 1.4 128:10.50 plugin-containe
> 9437 cer 20 0 278m 97m 3252 S 0 1.2 2:52.43 pine
> 7913 cer 20 0 3773m 82m 6188 S 0 1.0 1:29.36 java
> 1091 root 20 0 150m 54m 1756 S 0 0.7 0:16.31 spamd child
> 1092 root 20 0 149m 50m 1732 S 0 0.6 0:35.31 spamd child
> 4911 named 20 0 429m 45m 1348 S 0 0.6 1:16.05 named
> 7289 cer 20 0 1004m 27m 9428 S 0 0.3 0:12.98 Thunar
> 7181 news 20 0 34724 26m 860 S 0 0.3 0:00.22 leafnode
> 7588 cer 20 0 847m 25m 10m S 0 0.3 0:12.07 tomboy
> 13166 vscan 20 0 143m 25m 1752 S 0 0.3 0:00.36 /usr/sbin/amavi
> 13085 vscan 20 0 143m 25m 1752 S 0 0.3 0:00.54 /usr/sbin/amavi
> 16395 vscan 20 0 143m 24m 1752 S 0 0.3 0:00.35 /usr/sbin/amavi
> 20746 vscan 20 0 143m 24m 1752 S 0 0.3 0:00.33 /usr/sbin/amavi
> 20771 vscan 20 0 143m 24m 1752 S 0 0.3 0:00.20 /usr/sbin/amavi
> 13382 cer 20 0 929m 23m 9m S 0 0.3 0:33.22 nautilus
> 27174 cer 20 0 256m 23m 10m S 0 0.3 1:26.03 acroread
> 7294 cer 20 0 354m 23m 8956 S 0 0.3 5:59.39 xfce4-panel
> 7082 cer 20 0 150m 20m 15m S 0 0.3 0:00.60 lyx
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
Hahaha! lol! You’re scraping the barrel now! Next you’ll be telling me that acroread' is lightweight because it's towards the bottom of that list and pine’ is heavy because it’s near the top ;)!