Two mate low overhead and Xara

[uberzilla]

Hello, this is casual stuff. First, have been looking at Mageia for a while for potentially replacing Ubuntu Studio (artist, and digital illustrator). What attracts me is that I can strip Mate desktop down to low overhead - see screenshot. Just keeping a look out for what works best in my circumstances. I use Mageia as a backup daily driver on one of my laptops, and have old version 6 in 32 bit on a very old Dell laptop limited to 3.3 gigs of RAM. Reason - Mate on version 6 in 32 bit - I got it stripped down to 131 megs at start up - using the terminal command - it was an outstanding era!
Is there anyone who can point me to any information on Mate desktop that can tell me why on this Fedora base (Mageia) I can get the overhead so low compared to other Linux bases (Ubuntu, Debian). XFCE has been my favorite desktop for years, due to its configurability and acceptable overhead (not much for stuff like Gnome). But Mate is a nice no nonsense environment - and in Mageia - less overhead.
The other part is the potential of the old failed Xara. Xara continued working in Mageia up through version 6 in 32 bit.
Since that point it suffers at least one catastrophic problem - blend function crashes. I captured the error output in a text file. This is probably a dead issue, but wondered if others were interested in this. I don't know if I can upload a zip file - please advise on that. My phone won't let me move a txt file onto it - so have to put in a zipped folder.
This archaic program still houses the fastest, robust vector handling engine - even in commercial programs. There is obviously always a lot for the GNU, Linux, and distro groups to deal with (hardware compatability, Nvidia,etc). I'm thinking in terms of a program - if salvageable, can still be a big feather in the open source side. Obviously not even close to being high up on the ladder of priorities. Not taking away from Inkscape ( which I've used a few times for professional work on small jobs), but this Xara software is far more robust. This old version can be used to produce serious stuff - still.
Wondering if there is even a pulse left on this patient (Xara).

Look forward to what the team comes up with in the next release.

Screenshot of low overhead in Mate - very desirable, and a screenshot of the Xara crash error - full text file not attached as I don't know if it is okay to do so.

[benmc]

reply in 2 parts.

1/ Mate DE.
Not overly familiar with the Debian packaging, but the package for Mageia Mate will be task-mate. I think the Debian family use distribution-meta-mate as the package.
If you installed Mate from the Classical installer.iso, the package is incomplete, in that, due to space limitations in the .iso (limited to 4.7GB) some of the default packages are missing.
Should you install via the netinstaller, the complete task-mate install will be significantly larger, and as a result more background services running, resulting in a larger ram footprint.
Likely the reason you can reduce the ram footprint is the way Mageia task-mate and Debian ~meta-mate have their dependency linkage. you may be able to remove packages from task-mate, and so background services, that you are unable to do so from ~meta-mate.

2/ Xara
google search give =>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xara_Xtreme_LX.
a google search for xarino mentioned in the above article as successor finds no new entries.

A xara search in Mageia bugzilla returned no results specific the the application. this implies low usage or it never gives a problem!

Depending on your hardware, you could maybe run Mageia-6 (with Xara) in a virtual box. due to its age (2005 and only 32bit) it is unlikely to use modern GPU for rendering.
Probably best to open a specific thread regarding Xara, (xaraxl) as it seems a pretty specific program, you would require specific assistance.

you can certainly add a file

add a file.png (23.48 KiB) Viewed 1588 times

by clicking on the "upload attachement" tab below the main body text window.
Using the code button

code.png (13.9 KiB) Viewed 1588 times

press the code button and copy/paste the terminal output between the internal [ code ]in here[ /code ] brackets

Code: Select all

urpmi task-mate

[uberzilla]

Thank much for the info on MATE. That makes sense. I'm not an advanced Linux user but that gives me a solid direction to go on!

On Xara LX, I suspect it is all but dead. I will see if I can find anyone out there looking into it. I remember reading the partnership with then Xara and the open source community went sour - Xara wouldn't give access to the core engine.
Mageia was the last Linux distro Xara LX worked in without problems. It stopped working on the Ubuntu side years earlier.
Attached is an example of why I bring this up. It is a very old piece I did in Xara 2. Xara LX had all the same tools. In Inkscape this is possible, though it would start to slow down. More complex things I've done in Xara would crash Inkscape. In fact it would crash Adobe Illustrator (where I have to do 80 to 90% of my commercial work).

I'm just a big fan of Linux and would love to see far greater success.

Attached is the txt file for the blend error in a zipped folder.