CentOS - Mar 2008 - the "official" lightweight desktop environment for CentOS?

I want to build a dedicated MythTV box using CentOS5. I need a 
lightweight desktop environment, something extremely simple that does 
not use much memory. Gnome and KDE use way too much memory and are too 
complex for what I want to do.
The system will login automatically to a certain account after booting 
up. After the automatic login, it will start immediately the MythTV 
frontend full-screen. If the frontend dies, the desktop needs to logout 
/ log back in automatically. No other application will run on this 
machine, only mythfrontend. There will only be one account. Think of it 
as a single-purpose appliance, not a regular computer.
Whatever I use as the desktop environment, it needs to be pretty 
standard - either included in the distribution proper, or in one of the 
major repositories. It must be very trivial to enable, with no hacking 
required to the OS. It must play well with mythfrontend, I don't need 
any compatibility issues. It must be a stable, reputable software.

Which desktop environment would you recommend based on the requirements?

-- 
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/

Florin Andrei a ?crit :
> I want to build a dedicated MythTV box using CentOS5. I need a 
> lightweight desktop environment, something extremely simple that does 
> not use much memory. Gnome and KDE use way too much memory and are too 
> complex for what I want to do.
X! F! C! E!

I've been using XFCE since 4.0 (currently it's 4.4.2), and since last 
December or so, I'm running it exclusively on all my desktops, at home 
and at work.

http://www.kikinovak.net/images/centos5-xfce.png

After logging in, XFCE takes 49 MB of RAM (YMMV), so it's rather 
lightweight.

You have to enable the [extra] repos to get XFCE.

I have some documentation on http://www.microlinux.fr about tweaking and 
fine-tuning XFCE under CentOS, but it's in french.

Cheers,

Niki

On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 01:24:09AM -0700, Florin Andrei
alleged:
> I want to build a dedicated MythTV box using CentOS5. I need a 
> lightweight desktop environment, something extremely simple that does 
> not use much memory. Gnome and KDE use way too much memory and are too 
> complex for what I want to do.
> The system will login automatically to a certain account after booting 
> up. After the automatic login, it will start immediately the MythTV 
> frontend full-screen. If the frontend dies, the desktop needs to logout 
> / log back in automatically. No other application will run on this 
> machine, only mythfrontend. There will only be one account. Think of it 
> as a single-purpose appliance, not a regular computer.
> Whatever I use as the desktop environment, it needs to be pretty 
> standard - either included in the distribution proper, or in one of the 
> major repositories. It must be very trivial to enable, with no hacking 
> required to the OS. It must play well with mythfrontend, I don't need 
> any compatibility issues. It must be a stable, reputable software.
> 
> Which desktop environment would you recommend based on the requirements?
It's not "official" (not sure what that means), but I use fluxbox
on my
mythbox.

-- 
Garrick Staples, GNU/Linux HPCC SysAdmin
University of Southern California

Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
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On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 5:24 AM, Florin Andrei <florin at andrei.myip.org>
wrote:
> I want to build a dedicated MythTV box using CentOS5. I need a
> lightweight desktop environment, something extremely simple that does
> not use much memory. Gnome and KDE use way too much memory and are too
> complex for what I want to do.
> The system will login automatically to a certain account after booting
> up. After the automatic login, it will start immediately the MythTV
> frontend full-screen. If the frontend dies, the desktop needs to logout
> / log back in automatically. No other application will run on this
> machine, only mythfrontend. There will only be one account. Think of it
> as a single-purpose appliance, not a regular computer.
> Whatever I use as the desktop environment, it needs to be pretty
> standard - either included in the distribution proper, or in one of the
> major repositories. It must be very trivial to enable, with no hacking
> required to the OS. It must play well with mythfrontend, I don't need
> any compatibility issues. It must be a stable, reputable software.
>
> Which desktop environment would you recommend based on the requirements?
Do you really need a window manager? Maybe you can run something like:

xinit glxgears -- /usr/bin/X :1

-- 
Marcelo

"?No ser? acaso que ?sta vida moderna est? teniendo m?s de moderna que
de vida?" (Mafalda)