If you use Windows, you're not usually faced with the question of what window manager or file manager or shell programs you want to use. You typically use what comes with Windows and any customization is basically done on screen colors and default fonts. On the other hand, Linux gives you tons of choices for options like these. Personally, I'm not thrilled with either extreme. I'll go through some options for low resource systems on Linux or FreeBSD (which cuts down choices) and I'll even mention a few extra options for Windows which most Windows users probably have not tried. Picking the right window and file managers on a low resource POSIX system can make a huge difference in responsiveness of the machine.
Linux and BSD have several Desktop options such as Gnome, KDE, Unity, XFCE. By their nature, most Desktop systems are resource intensive. The only one I recommend for a low resource system is LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment). If you have any doubts on how your favorite Desktop stacks up against LXDE, then just try them both on a machine with only 64 MB of RAM. You'll see a huge difference. One really nice thing about LXDE is that you can pick and choose just the pieces you want for your system and don't need to install all of LXDE to get the benefits of the programs that are a part of it. It's designed to use Openbox, but many of the lightweight tools will work well in a variety of window manager. I particularly like lxtask. It's similar to the Windows task manager. You can kill applications with it. If you're tired of a dockable app that's running, use this tool to stop the program. It also shows RAM usage. The lxappearance program lets you edit the look and feel of GTK+ 2 programs. The lxterminal program makes a good replacement for xterm. Even if it's not what you decide to use as your main terminal program, it's a nice backup terminal program to have around just in case settings get messed up with the terminal program you use most often. There are other interesting lightweight programs as well. You can run the LXDE programs you want as needed and leave out the ones you don't need.
If you want a small desktop style program to run with Fluxbox (or another window manager), you may want to check out fxdesktop. It makes use of the Fox Toolkit library. I managed to build it on one of my systems with no issues, but to run it, you need to open a terminal in your window manager of choice and type the following:
export "FOX_DESKTOP_WM=fluxbox" fxdesktop
If you're not using fluxbox, substitute your windows manager. I don't like much on my screen, but this makes an interesting addition.
Personally, I don't use any of the popular Desktop choices out there. I customize the software I use for the desktop myself. I'll list some of my favorites below.
If you're going to do anything GUI based on Linux or FreeBSD, you'll usually have an X server running. There are X servers for Windows that run natively (like Xming) or with Cygwin, but I don't really know of that many Windows users that bother to run one. Once you have an X server set up, you can pick a window manager for it. When it comes to a lightweight window manager, the one that seems to be the most often mentioned is Fluxbox. It also comes with a lot of low resource distributions. The more I look at Fluxbox, the more I like it. It's highly customizable through files in your home directory under the hidden .fluxbox subdirectory. You can change the menus, add shortcut keys or pass configuration information when calling a program.
I've been experimenting with Openbox as well, which is another Blackbox derivative. I really had trouble deciding between Fluxbox and Openbox. Both allow you to set up the menu to call other window managers in order to switch to them. So, you can easily switch back and forth between Fluxbox and Openbox. I find editing Fluxbox configuration files less error-prone than Openbox ones. However, Openbox seems to adhere more to standards including using XML for configuration settings. Openbox lets you switch between applications using the alt-tab key by default, but does not include a panel that lists all the open applications (for clicking to activate). You can use any third party panel software you like with Openbox though. Tint 2 is one good substitute you can try out. There are two key differences between these window managers for me. Openbox does a better job of drawing the menu on my machine. It works better with mouse and key press combinations and the screen seems to redraw more cleanly after the menu is dismissed. Fluxbox takes less memory on my machine. I've read from some sources that Openbox is more lightweight, but my tests using conky, lxtask and other programs to check RAM in use (on Linxu and FreeBSD) show Fluxbox uses about 1 megabyte less on my lowest resource machine. If you need to add a panel program and other custom applications to Openbox, it can take up even more.
Of the other lightweight window managers I've read about, another promising option appears to be dwm. It's a tiling Window manager (although it also has floating and monocle modes). You can change the default settings straight in the C code, which is nice for a programmer. There are also several examples of customized versions of dwm available online. One strange thing I've noticed with dwm on FreeBSD happens when I run it with conky. Conky indicates I'm using up a lot of memory. It may be the combination of dwm with conky. I don't see the issue when I use top to display system information instead of conky. Typically dwm uses less memory than Fluxbox or Openbox.
Windows users shouldn't feel completely left out when it comes to window managers. You can check out Blackbox (which Fluxbox originally derived from) on Windows. Look for bblean. There are also ports of dwm to Windows. One, bug.n, uses autohotkey and works very nicely.
If you want the screen to redraw cleanly using either Openbox or Fluxbox, you need another program to help you out. You can use xsetroot or hsetroot to redraw a color background. Both window managers usually recognize if you have either of these installed. Feh is a popular lightweight program for drawing custom graphics backgrounds on a desktop (main window). Fluxbox supports it and Openbox can be scripted to use it as well in place of xsetroot or hsetroot. I've also noticed some people using nitrogen for background setting/redrawing tasks.
If you're going to run Openbox, check out the obconf program to configure colors and other basic settings. LXDE also offers LXAppearance, another configuration program, which includes some integration with obconf for certain builds. Most POSIX distributions offer pre-packaged theme additions for certain window managers. For instance, there's an openbox-themes package that works with Openbox. You can use the themes in conjunction with obconf or LXAppearance. You can create your own Openbox themes from scratch or customize and install themes with the obtheme program.
There are also tools to help edit menus in Openbox. Since the ones I've seen are interpreted programs, I found it easier and less resource intensive just to use a text editor to edit the menu configuration file directly. On Debian, if you install their menu package and make sure the proper entries are added, Openbox's pipe menu system can automatically update a section of the menus under the Debian menu entry when you install packages on your system. In $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS/openbox/menu.xml, make sure there's an entry for:
<menu id="Debian" />
In $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS/openbox/rc.xml, you'll need the following entries and the lines need to be uncommented if there were comment marks disabling the code:
<file>/var/lib/openbox/debian-menu.xml</file> <file>debian-menu.xml</file>
Window managers that let you map keyboard shortcuts can be set to bring up specific applications when you click a shortcut. For instance, I've configured Openbox to bring up a screenshot program to take a snapshot of my desktop when I press PrintScreen. You can use any screenshot program. I happen to like using graphicsmagick at present. It can also be used in conjunction with photocrop so you can specify what portion of your screen to capture. Another nice trick with window managers that support keyboard shortcuts is the ability to toggle hiding and showing of all open applications using a key combination like Windows - D.
I mentioned Tint 2 for use with window managers that don't have their own panels. Tint 2 also offers support for applications that minimize and appear as tray icons. Realizing I could now display tray icons similar to Windows on my POSIX systems, I was left wondering what applications supported this functionality and decided to do a search. One of the first programs I ran across with this capability was volumeicon. It's a nice substitute for the speaker icon usually found in the tray on Windows. It can let you raise or lower volume or bring up a mixer such as alsamixergui. Stardict on Windows has tray support, so it was no surprise to find that similar functionality works on POSIX systems. I also use Sylpheed on Windows and it has tray support. I eventually found vmg (Virtual Magnifying Glass) which puts a magnifying glass icon in one's tray and can be called up to magnify areas of a screen. I'm still looking for a tray icon to replace the Windows task manager on Linux.
Window managers such as Fluxbox and Openbox also have built in support for dockable apps. It's far easier to find dockable apps than it is to find applications with tray support. There's even a dockapps.org web site that collects and catalogs quite a lot of them.
For Windows users, I found some great utilities for anyone who liked Windows XP and can't quite get used to Vista or Windows 7. Check out the Windows Classic Shell project at Sourceforge. It doesn't attempt to replace your Windows shell. It does offer user friendly tools such as a menu alternative and file manager and browser improvements. I highly recommend it.
I really don't use file managers much. I tend to prefer typing commands to get around or copying files from the command line both on Windows and Linux. There are two places where I find a file manager may come in handy though. When running multimedia files such as music or graphics, I like to be able to navigate to a directory with those files, click on them and have them play or display with a particular program based on their file extensions. I also like to be able to compare two directories and copy files from one to another to get them in sync. A tool like dirmatch (DOS) or wmatch (Windows) works well, but with POSIX systems, I've yet to find a good replacement for these programs. A nice two pane file manager with a copy command may help fill this gap.
Some of the file manager options I've looked at are Worker, Xfe, mc and vifm. Worker takes a while to get the hang of, but is highly customizable. Using the afvs library, you can add the ability to look into compressed files. It doesn't support .tlz format (tar with lzma compression) yet though and I haven't been able to contact the person maintaining the library to check into adding support in some way. Xfe will seem very familiar if you're used to working with Windows Explorer on the Windows platform. It uses the Fox Toolkit libraries, so you'll need that installed if you want Xfe working. I had trouble compiling some of the later versions, but .99 built. Some Linux repositories do have later versions working though. I've tried the package with Debian Squeeze and the version they distribute just doesn't let you move the program around properly. Xfe will let you customize your view so you can have two panes or a directory tree and a listing of your files. Fox Toolkit also comes with a cross platform file manager called PathFinder. Midnight Commander (mc) works on Linux, plus there's a port to Windows. There's even been a patch to view .tlz files made for it. A similar alternative, vifm, may not have all the features of mc, but it does scroll easier when trying to compare two directories in two different panes. It also attempts to make key commands work similar to commands in vi. Looking for alternatives that would run using the GTK+ 2 GUI libraries, I found more than one that could handle a two pane display, including emelfm2 and Gentoo (not to be confused with the Linux operating system also by that name) which is very similar to Worker. The emelfm2 program is supposed to be highly customizable. I wasn't too thrilled with it when I first looked at it, but the more I experiment with it the more I like it. It's useful for launching applications to play or display a directory of files based on their file extensions.
Another interesting option adds functionality to the shell program rather than creating a separate file manager. The scrolling of the two panes works much better than the file managers I've tried and it's highly customizable, but doesn't appear easy to set up. If you're curious check out bash_commander which is an extension to the standard bash shell. It certainly looks promising.
If you prefer to see and click on icons to launch applications, I'm finding gpe-appmgr a nice alternative to the Windows file system for that particular purpose. There are some other programs that display icons and launch applications including one that's a part of LXDE. However, gpe-appmgr is the most polished solution I've tried to date.
I've yet to find a file manager that does everything I want. If you have other suggestions that can handle the two types of tasks I need, they would also be appreciated. I have been looking into using a menu, like dmenu or 9menu in combination with a script to display all files of a certain type in a directory and launch applications related to them. Openbox also supports scriptable menus and provides another option. I'm still searching for a good, cross platform compatible menu tool. I can also get a decent directory difference listing using scripts and diffh with some other tools (on Windows or Linux). However, that only shows directory differences. It doesn't allow for easy copying of files from one directory to the next. One would still need to go back to the file manager, a menu program scripted to copy files or use the command line copy and/or move commands to put two directories in sync after finding the differences between them. I also noticed, it's hard to view the output on diffh without a decent browser. So far, Opera is the most lightweight browser I've found that does a good job of displaying the output. Firefox and IE also work fine, but take more resources. I've yet to check chromium and uzbl on some systems, but they could offer some more lightweight possibilities as compared to IE or Firefox. Another option for a low resource system might be to use a decent HTML to Postscript converter and view the differences with ghostscript instead of a browser.
While I've written some interesting scripts for running multimedia files with dmenu, I wanted a possibly cross-platform solution and definitely a non-X Windows solution. I've experimented with menu systems with bash scripts and dialog. Dialog compiles using curses on a variety of systems, including Windows and can be run in console mode. There's even an X version of dialog, if you want the X look and feel while running in X Windows. Latest patched version of dialog appears to be available from the Ubuntu site. FreeBSD has a freedialog version with a more user friendly licensing scheme. I've also been looking at espeak and flite (festival lite). I'd love to try to get either of them working in conjunction with the menus. It might be a nice option for a visually impaired user as well. If anyone knows of some good ways to do that, I'd love to hear about it. The latest tools I've been looking into are using JavaScript such as the v8cgi implementation for scripting in place of bash and DOS style batch files and using a web browser or a dialog-like tool such as yad for the GUI interface. For console support, dialog appears to be the best choice, but for more flexible GUI support, yad seems to have the most functionality of the various dialog-like programs I've tried to date. Options like web applications or HTA can offer the flexibility of web design with limited scripting ability.
DeLi came with rxvt, mxrvt (similar to aterm or rxvt but multi-tabbed) and xterm. I checked a web site that compared terminal programs and the ones it most recommended for low memory machines were rxvt, wterm and eterm. It also mentioned that xterm can be among the slowest terminal programs. I started using the rxvt program after that. You can customize the look of it further via the command line and through settings in certain files. When I read that some terminal programs let you run multiple instances and share resources, I thought that would be just the thing for a low resource machine. Some of the terminal programs that fit in that category are sakura (which might also have some extra support for cut and paste), lxterminal and rxvt-unicode. Upon reading further, rxvt-unicode was purported to use the least as far as libraries to get it up and running. My latest terminal program of choice is now rxvt-unicode. Run urxvtd -q -f -o once and then any time you need a terminal, run urxvtc. You can use very similar command line settings for rxvt and urxvtc to customize the look and feel. I added options to my menus to call urxvtc with customized command line parameters. That lets me set up colors, scroll bar appearance and text buffering size however I prefer. You can further customize functionality of rxvt-unicode using Perl scripts. I use a Perl script to add customized cut and paste functionality through xclip (or xsel). If autocutsel is running in the background, it automatically synchronizes cut buffers (used by the terminal program) with the clipboard. Am hoping to further customize the script to create keyboard shortcuts for cut and paste those of us who prefer the keyboard to the mouse.
While Windows users don't usually have to worry about working with terminal programs, it's useful for people who like to work with a keyboard to have a good command line interface. If you'd like some options to the standard Windows command prompt, check out msys available from the mingw compiler project at Sourceforge and Powershell available from the Microsoft web site. You can even run DOS commands in Dosbox (both on Windows and Linux) if you prefer working in DOS. Djgpp has a DOS version of Bash available too.
On Windows and DOS, I usually use the standard DOS commands and batch files. Microsoft came up with Powershell to handle serious scripting, but there's already a perfectly good cross-platform option available with Bash. It may not be installed by default on some systems, but you can use it on Linux, BSD machines, and on Windows with Cygwin and msys and for DOS with djgpp. I've also been investigating Javascript as a server side and shell scripting option. I feel very comfortable with its syntax. The one drawback is that there really isn't yet a highly recognized standard for server or shell extensions. The language itself is pretty well standardized and has a standards group for language additions. At this point, I personally like the v8cgi extensions and am hoping to use it in some of my cross-platform projects for shell scripting. As I mentioned above, dialog is available on most systems to give scripts a graphical interface. Dialog works in console mode. Try yad on Posix and Win32 machines for a more standard GUI look.
I ran across a nice command line menu tool at the same site where you'll find dwm. It's called dmenu. It took me a while to figure out how to use it, but you can check the script files that come with it for some good examples that can give you a jump start. It looks like a good alternative to the Fluxbox or Openbox menu system. It integrates very well with dwm (which it was designed for) and could be useful with any lightweight window managers that don't offer a comfortable, built-in menu system solution. I was even able to create a menu with dmenu that called other dmenu listings displaying application names for each category of programs I wanted to run. If you like using a command line over a mouse, this a good option. I tried several other menu programs, but the only other one that looked promising to me was 9menu which was part of the Plan9 project. Some of the other projects for Plan9 could certainly be worth checking out as well. Both dmenu and 9menu need X Windows to function. For a console mode menu that would work outside of X Windows, I was back to considering dialog with some appropriate shell scripts.
One thing terminal programs don't seem to handle well is cut and paste especially between themselves and other types of applications. It's difficult to move information between a terminal program, such as urxvt, and any other program, such as my favorite text editor SciTE. When I started experimenting with this, I had hoped to set the Fluxbox keymapping to call some buffer program on Control-C and Control-V keys, but that didn't work out too well. I did finally find a solution, not the one I wanted, but a workable one. Ran across mention that Puppy Linux had solved the buffer issue between applications (edit menu and mouse highlighting) and terminals (mouse highlighting) using a program called autocutsel. I tried several buffer clipping programs, but autocutsel really does want I need. It synchronizes the cut buffers (used by most terminal programs) with the clipboard. You can call it to from your init file before starting Fluxbox or Openbox and let it run in the background. I also found the program xclipboard very handy to use along with autocutsel for cutting and pasting. Am hoping to eventually write Perl scripts that worth with urxvt to get the keyboard support for cutting and pasting that I've been wanting.
At one point, I tried a live CD with Tinyme (a Unity based distro) on one of my machines. It had a version of drakconf, the Mandrake Control Center. I really liked this option. A graphical control center is just the thing someone switching from Windows could use, especially when trying to trouble-shoot how much hardware isn't working with Linux. Drakconf uses Perl scripts with some C routines and I considered converting it to run on other versions of Linux and possibly FreeBSD. I found out AntiX had a control center as well, but used shell scripts, gtkdialog and some programs from its repositories to implement it. Rather than porting one of these options, I decided the easiest way to get the equivalent of a control center working on various distributions quickly was to choose various readily available applications that already did pieces of the job. These programs could be combined either through a standard menu system (like the Fluxbox or Openbox menus or dmenu or 9menu) or using some scripts and a program like dialog or yad. So, that just left choosing which programs to include as part of my computer's control center.
For hardware information, there are several options, but I really like the program hardinfo. It gives a nice overview of what hardware your operating system thinks is connected. For Windows users, it's similar to the Device Manager, devmgmt.msc. Some other options to show hardware information are xosview and x86info which also have versions for FreeBSD and saidar, xsysinfo and sysstat.
I was having some difficulties assigning user groups from the command line. So, I looked for some tools to handle user and group management. The only tool I could find in the user management category was usermode. It helps you change your password, default shell, etc. Looks like it was initially created for Fedora, but it works on other Linux distributions too. I did eventually run across a Python script that uses GTK+ 2 mentioned at an Arch Linux forum. It's called luser.py. It provides a nice graphical interface for adding and removing users from groups.
For screen resolution, there are programs like grandr, lxrandr (from LXDE) and wmressel. For Internet connection status with modems, there's pppstatus. For disk usage on POSIX systems, there's xdiskusage and du. If you're using Windows, take a look at WinDirStat. There's even a portable version. For ejecting DVDs and CDs on POSIX systems, there's eject.
One can change the look and feel of their system on at least two levels on POSIX systems, on the window manager level and on the program (GUI library level). LXDE offers LXAppearance which you can use to switch themes, icons and fonts. If Openbox is your window manager, you can use obconf to do general customization. Obtheme is a Python and GTK+ 2 based application that lets you edit or create your own Openbox themes and highly customize the look and feel of Openbox. Gui libraries such as GTK+ 2 and Qt have configuration programs that also let you customize themes and the look and feel of software built with those libraries. Both switch2 (gtk-theme-switch 2) and gtkchtheme let you change theme preferences for GTK+ 2 on POSIX machines. Qtconfig lets you configure QT based applications.
I didn't find much in the way of low resource tools for the printer. Distributions like AntiX and Crunchbang make use of system-config-printer a Python script using GTK+ 2 to configure CUPS for printing. Calling system-config-printer-applet --no-tray-icon shows the printer queue. Calling system-config-printer-applet --my-default-printer shows the default printer settings. It's a little more resource intensive than what I wanted and needs a few Gnome dependencies. Another Python and GTK+ 2 program is foomatic-gui which also has several Gnome dependencies. There's xpp, the X Printing Panel, which controls printing options for CUPS. It uses FLTK. Another solution for controlling printing options to CUPS is GtkLP which uses GTK+ 2. It includes a nice printing queue feature. Also, if you're running CUPS, you can access CUPS related information by bringing up http://localhost:631/admin in a browser. Most of these work on BSD as well as Linux systems.
There are several font related programs, but most don't look useful for low resource systems. The Font-Manager program at the Google Code site is the best option I've found to date.
One other piece I wanted was a runlevel manager, so I could turn off system applications that I wasn't using and speed up system response time. If the system is designed simply and elegantly enough, you can edit the information in a file by hand with a text editor. However, some Linux distributions, such as those implementing System V type mechanisms, complicate things too much to do this easily. Two good runlevel managers for systems such as Debian that use sysv-rc for their runlevel change mechanism are bum and sysv-rc-conf. Bum uses Perl and GTK+ 2. Sysv-rc-conf uses Perl and Curses, so it runs in console mode. The file-rc system is an alternative boot mechanism for distributions like Debian. One can use rcconf, built using Perl and whiptail or dialog, with it or can edit a single file, /etc/runlevel.conf, in a standard text editor. Windows users have a similar tool to control what applications are running with the System Configuration Utility which can be run from a command prompt by specifying the path and name of the utility, msconfig or by typing and entering:
start msconfig
If you're a Windows user, you usually don't notice any issues with plug-and-play devices. Worst case scenario, the system can't find a driver and you need to run a search for one. With POSIX systems, being able to hotswap peripherals is a more recent innovation which is still being worked into the operating system. There are three places I've most noticed hotswapping infiltrating Linux systems, with X Windows, with ALSA (the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) and with mounting drives.
X Windows now handles removable keyboards and mice. With older machines, I found that hotswapping might not work too well and could actually interfere with finding built-in keyboards or touchpads. To turn off hotswapping of devices such as keyboards or mice, I had to add the following to the ServerFlags section of xorg.conf:
Option "AllowEmptyInput" "false" Option "AutoAddDevices" "false"
Some newer audio cards can be connected to machines by USB or sometimes Firewire. There's work being done to handle some of this hardware by projects like FFADO. ALSA has incorporated support for certain removable audio devices. When I attempted to setup my audio device on a Debian system, I had trouble installing and setting up ALSA properly. I searched the web and looked through several documents on ALSA setup, but, unfortunately, many were contradictory or out of date. Unable to figure out which information was still pertinent, I asked on a Debian forum and even asked my local Linux users group. No one seemed knowledgeable about the internals of ALSA and how to properly set it up. Giving up on finding any help or up-to-date documentation, I went to the source and started reading the actual source code in the ALSA packages. I should have done that in the first place. I found out any references to modprobe or modprobe.conf on Debian are dated. ALSA uses udev to set up sound devices. I also found out the hard way that if I installed ALSA before installing udev (which I did), I only got a partial install. I had to install udev and then reinstall ALSA to get sound working.
Many file managers now not only use udev, they also use various libraries on top of it such as HAL or DeviceKit. All these libraries often slow older, low resource systems to a crawl. The old way of working with hard drives was to use the mount and umount commands or to add the devices to /etc/fstab. This becomes problematic when you have several hot swappable devices. You need to know what device a drive is mapped to before you can mount it. You could set up a USB drive to always mount to a certain location in /etc/fstab and mount it when you install the drive. However, what if you need to mount two USB drives or what if one USB drive has multiple partitions. It becomes even more complicated if your hard drives are hot swappable. You can't always assume your USB drive will be ordered just after your hard drive in sequencing if you may have one hard drive one time you boot and two installed the next.
You may think you're running a lightweight system if you use /etc/fstab on your machine, but most popular file managers these days are using udev and probably some other libraries as well. So, if you're using those file managers or other software that pulls in device management systems, you've probably slowed down your machine performance more than you realize. The most lightweight option so far if you need hotswap functionality for drives is just using udev by itself. You can set up rules to tell it how to recognize your various drives or other USB devices (such as cameras, card readers) and how to mount them automatically. It takes a while to learn the syntax for setting up udev. However, once you do, you can set up rules for any of your hotswappable devices that are supported in Linux. You can use a simple file manager like emelfm2 or xfe or any file manager with no built-in capabilities to mount hotswapped devices if you want to keep your system lightweight. So, then how do you mount the devices easily? If you don't want to learn the syntax and set up your own rules for udev, there are some other options such as various automounter utilities.
For Linux, there's usbmount. It automounts USB drives using udev. I did read that the package was no longer maintained, but it worked fine for the Debian Squeeze system I tried it on. With FreeBSD, I use am-utils (Berkeley automounter). This is available on Linux as well. I've also read about autofs. Both am-utils and autofs have the useful feature that they automatically unmount devices if you don't use them for a while. The Arch Linux wiki has a few suggestions for tools with fewer dependencies than those that require HAL including one called uam. It also has examples of integration with a window manager. If you check out the yad (Yet Another Dialog) wiki, you'll see examples of using yad to create a GUI interface for udev for mounting and unmounting flash drives. I'd be very interested to hear from others who are trying to lower resource usage if they've found better options or which of the tools I mentioned worked best for them.
If you'd like to contact me with any suggestions for applications or settings or any fixes for information on this page or my other Open Source related pages or any other tips on working with Open Source, I'd be interested in hearing from you. If you have questions of your own and are using Linux or a BSD system, I do recommend you check any forums there may be for the distribution you're running. It's been very useful for me so far to do so. Also, check your favorite search engines if you need more help. Please do share any suggestions for light or useful applications if you have any. I'll be updating these pages to share with interested readers as I learn more information.