My trusty Thinkpad and Mrxvt

I’ve started using my laptop again after letting it rest for a few months. My sitting area was starting to become a marketplace where different departments kept bothering me with trivial stuff and the high noise levels were driving me crazy. I had to seek a quieter place to work where I could retreat to when working on critical stuff (which it is most of the time these days). Good thing there was a WiFi access point lying around that allowed me to find a corner for this.

Now I’ve had my tiny, yet durable IBM Thinkpad for over four years and Celeron 400MHz with 128MB RAM just doesn’t cut it anymore, but it’s good enough for most of my work. I usually just need to login to a dozen or so systems (where most of my actual work is done) and maybe keep a browser and instant messenger open.

The machinery in question had a very basic Slackware Linux 10 installation with a minimal desktop (fluxbox) and I was using the lightweight rxvt as my terminal. After upgrading to Slackware 10.1 and changing the window manager to IceWM, I realised that maintaining even a few open rxvts becomes a tedious task and I just had to have tab support.

Since Gnome Terminal requires Gnome libraries and all the extra bloat that’s part of the Gnome package, I tried searching for a lighter, simpler solution. Lo and behold, a little gem called Mrxvt popped up:

http://materm.sourceforge.net/

It functions in almost the same way as Gnome Terminal (Alt + <number> to quickly change tabs etc.), but didn’t require any additional packages on my system. Plus, it seems pretty light. I’m also thinking of using it on my higher-spec desktops.

Another thing. Firefox 1.0.1 seems to have some memory leak issues which causes the system to run out of available RAM after letting it run for a while. They have released version 1.0.2 and I’m getting it now. Let’s see if it fixes this.