Gconfd and non-resident operation..

[Tom Lisjac <netdxr adelphia net>]

Hi All!

I'm new to the list and hope someone can point us in the right direction
on the following problem.

Our local school district has agreed to use Linux in some of their
classrooms, if we developed a system that will run on their older
P-III's with 128m of ram. I've put together a desktop environment using
gnome-panel and Icewm that meets the specs (running Mozilla and
StarOffice 7 concurrently without swapping)... but memory is still very
very tight and the machines bog down badly if they're driven into swap.

Other then gnome-panel, there are no Gnome apps on their "must have"
list... so I'd like to suppress gconfd's respawn/stay resident behavior
so every byte of ram can be available to the apps. I'm currently doing
this in .Xclients with the following startup:

exec /usr/local/bin/icewm &
{ while true; do sleep 15; gconftool-2 --shutdown; done; } &
exec gnome-panel

This is a crude solution at best, but the prototype systems perform well
and have all run for several weeks without any problems. Evolution and
other Gnome apps have been part of the testing process and also run
normally. Still, this doesn't seem like the "right" way to do this and
I'm hoping someone on the list can suggest a better approach. 

Best regards,

-Tom Lisjac
http://linux.harrison.k12.co.us