Topic awaiting preservation: suggested linux webtools

Currently i am building an web-developer machine from my old toshiba tecra 8100 notebook. To get the most power/functionality out of it i have choosen to install gentoo linux with an for this machine optimized kernel. To make it into an web develop machine i need some web tools.
These should be as lightweight as possible in the resources acount while giving me no handicaps in the functionality part.
So if you do have some good sugestions please do post them here.

My shortlist at the moment would be:
X:
- Xwindows (The X.org version looks very good)
- XFCE or IceWM as windowmanager
- Firefox with the webdev and the aardvark extensions
- Bluefish webeditor
- Gimp
console:
- links2 browser
- nano editor
- Xampp?? (this is probably overkill )
The whole thing should fit on a 5GB harddisk and run on an pentiumIII 500MHz machine with 256MB of memory. It would even better if i could fit on an Bootable CD-ROM so i would not always need my laptop. The project files and maybe the Xampp installations will be on an External USB2/Firewire harddisk.
Any sugestions?

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:: Develop yourself, develop your life, develop the world ::
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Try fluxbox for a window manager. It's super duper light weight.

for the console, i don't think i'ver ever used any of those. just the regular console app. can't remember what that was

Do the X.org. It's pretty cool.

Can't remember which one, but Quanta was a good html editor but it was either that or Bluefish that was a bit more resource hungry.

If you want a small X, then check out Slackware. It's pretty darn small if you don't install all of that extra stuff. One thing you could check out to run is puppy linux. If you have the hard drive set to ext2 then you can run it off of the cd and save the files. If it's ntfs then you have it save to a file but not sure how that really works. The puppy linux is pretty cool. I have it running on my laptop sometimes but haven't played with it a lot.

Anyway, sounds like a fun project. I'm getting ready to build another linux box but use it mostly for a toy and fileserver type of thing.

Let me know how it turns out.

Later,

C:\

Well... Xampp isn't console, for one thing. Lynx or Lynx 2 should do you for text browsing, and are also a good way to check that your page is open-access compliant. Nano, Vi, Pico... whatever you're most comfortable with, use that for text editing.


Justice 4 Pat Richard

I agree that xampp is probably overkill. I haven't used their Linux implementations, but judging from their Windows setup, they take a kitchen sink approach. As a development box, and probably "closed" from the outside world, you wouldn't need a mail server, name server and FTP servers, for instance.

That said, 256MB seems to go much farther under Linux than Windows. On one of my test servers--a P-III 500 w/256MB, btw--I have two separate instances of Apache running (one with PHP4 and the other with PHP5), MySQL, qmail, ProFTP, bind, SpamAssassin, clamav, Samba and a bunch of other junk, and there's still plenty of capacity for user GUI apps. Yeah, it swaps a lot, but it's still quite usable.

HowtoForge is a good alternative resource for learning how to set up the server stuff. See their "The Perfect Setup" series, available (but strangely hard to find on their site) for a half-dozen distros.

Don't forget a firewall, especially if you're going out wi-fi-ing. I use KISS firewall--a shell script to configure iptables--simply because when I was first starting out, I needed something that worked, without having to learn why it worked. KISS was easiest for me to understand how to modify it. Another popular one is APF.

On the client side of things, I've not used bluefish yet, but I intend to try it out--Real Soon Now. Coming from the standpoint of preferring tools that are OS independent, I've been using Nvu. Not 100% happy with it, but it is cross-platform.

Also, don't forget OpenOffice. Clients will *always* send their stuff as MS-Office files, and (no matter how much I harp on them) they want *everything* as a PDF. Ooo handles both.

As a GUI FTP client, I prefer gFTP over the others I've tried, but that's a personal style matter more than anything else.

I think I got this from here on the Asylum, but I wouldn't testify to it:

quote:

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IEs for Linux is a simple Bash Script program that installs Internet Explorer 6, 5.5 and 5 on Linux using Wine. The whole process is automatic and very easy.

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Haven't gotten around to trying it either, since Windows boxes are always nearby.

Well, that's a start. Hope this helps!

Maybe i try DirectFB as an X replacement. Acording to this picture it is possible to run gimp with it.....

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:: Develop yourself, develop your life, develop the world ::
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(Edited by Rinswind 2th on 12-13-2005 09:56)

Gah... sorry. XAMPP is console. I'm an idiot, and confused it with one of the multimedia programs. Honestly -- and I will admit to a little bit of masochism on this score -- I'd recommend downloading and compiling Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl all on your own. You can get a lighter install out of it, for one thing, you get more more control over it, and you learn more. Also, for installing packages, I'd recommend getting your hands on Python and yum, the Yellowdog Updater Modified. It's a wonderful thing.


Justice 4 Pat Richard

X.Org is basically the only full implementation people use anymore (for good reason), but you can get cut down versions without the bloat (they're used especially for VNC packages).

If you've got the space (and you should), I'd switch out Nano for Vim (and/or gVim). It's a very powerful editor and you might find yourself switching to it from a more standard editor like Bluefish. Makes a good console editor if you're good at it or not, though, and as it (or vi/nvi) comes standard on so many systems (BSDs, GNU/Linuxes, and more), it's nice to be familiar with it.

What you've listed so far you can get (with even more stuff) on many LiveCDs, so that should be doable.
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_build_a_LiveCD

Inkscape can be very useful, especially for logos, etc..

Another couple nice little things worth installing are advancecomp or pngcrush to compress images ridiculous amounts without losing quality, and pngtoico to quickly get a stupid "ICO" file.