SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the something-to-try-while-digesting-your-turkey dept.
In a rather curious turn, the Raspberry Pi foundation has released an x86 PC port of its PIXEL+Debian Linux desktop environment.
PIXEL (which is a clunky backronym for Pi Improved Xwindows Environment, Lightweight) is an extensively modified version of the LXDE X11 desktop environment. It was originally released in September for use with Raspberry Pi single-board computers, but now it has also been packaged up for x86 PCs. You can boot your Windows or Mac PC into the PIXEL desktop environment right now, if you so wish.
In the words of Eben Upton, founder of the foundation, PIXEL is "our best guess as to what the majority of users are looking for in a desktop environment [...] Put simply, it's the GNU/Linux we would want to use." To that end, PIXEL is both clean and modern-looking, but more importantly it is useful, with a wide range of productivity software and programming tools pre-installed. PIXEL doesn't eschew proprietary software, either; it even comes with the Adobe Flash browser plug-in.
Can any PIXEL users comment?
(Score: 1) by AlwaysNever on Sunday December 25 2016, @05:49PM
I have a Toshiba Tecra 8000 latop, sporting a Pentium-II Mobile CPU and 256 MB of RAM.
Would this PIXEL desktop run on it?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday December 25 2016, @05:55PM
Very slowly, yes. I've seen an LXDE desktop run in ~150MiB of memory, but that P2 is going to chug hard.
Why not run IceWM on that hardware? There are some very usable themes out there for it.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by AlwaysNever on Monday December 26 2016, @11:19AM
The Tecra 8000 already runs Debian "Sarge" 3.1 and IceWM. The problem is I haven't managed to get any browser newer than Iceweasel 2.0 to work in it.
For email that machine is great, and IceWeasel 2.0 with the NoScript add-on works great too, but I would like to use some newer version of the browser.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday December 26 2016, @05:06PM
Even my much newer (i.e., "only" 8+ years old...) Core 2 Duo machine struggles with any modern browser. The WWW is a bloated, ugly, script-laden mess. The best you'll get is continuing to use that, or perhaps trying something even less functional like Dillo or Links in graphical mode.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday December 25 2016, @06:56PM
Seriously, you'd be happier gutting that laptop, and chucking a Raspberry Pi Model 3 inside or Any One of These [beebom.com] inside it. Nobody would even know it was in there, but it would run so much better.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday December 25 2016, @09:38PM
How difficult would it be to connect the keyboard and screen though. Seems like I remember hearing that laptop keyboards tend to run on a non-standard stripped down USB bus.
I don't know about screens though. Do they commonly use a standard protocol? And is it something that you could feed directly from a RPi, or would you need an adapter board to convert from hdmi?