"upgrading" to fluxbox

so i want to "upgrade" to fluxbox. i currently am using gnome, but after reading around, i think i need to move on to something more light weight, and then configure it as much as possible to hopefully get something like google chrome OS...i'm speaking figuratively here. what i mean is, i want the operating system to take as little resources as possible, just to stay in the background and stay out of my way so i can work with applications...such as gimp, gedit, chrome. that's about it really. the problem is, it really is interesting to see what has become "the operating system". I mean, an operating system isn't just a kernel. it's at least a kernel and a terminal...and then there are a whole slew of other programs that most windows users consider a part of the operating system. i'm pretty sure most people put a barrier up if you try to say the web browser is part of the operating system, but what about something like sound? surely the configuration of the sound device is part of sound, but what about the programs that play the sound? i don't know. it may prove interesting during this exploratory phase of fluxbox.

so, yeah when i boot into fluxbox my system is using 400MB of ram, and when i boot into gnome it is using 900MB, just from a boot! i think this is sad. i mean, gnome doesn't look *that much* better than like windows 98, and it uses up that much ram? something is fishy here. i did a preliminary check, to try and kill the plethora of programs running listed in "ps aux", but after killing about 4 or 5 processes, i killed something that i apparently needed, because gdm kicked me back to the login screen without any mouse support. so figuring out processes i need and don't need is going to be a painstaking task. i'll have to be more methodical with it. according to top, that's 172 processes that i'm going to have to work through. well, it's something to do anyway.

i made a list of sorts of what i need to get working on fluxbox: color scheme | suspend | sound. basically, i need to have a color scheme that won't make me want to gouge my eyes out while i'm working with it. i mean, seriously, who can stand these high intensity color schemes on their computers? white background with black text? it is insane to me. i've been currently using the invert colors ability of compiz /w gnome to get the color scheme the way i want it, but i know this isn't an optimal solution. unfortunately, the color scheme of software really isn't something that is configurable all the time (as became obvious when i booted fluxbox and couldn't configure the terminator terminal app).

at any rate, after the color scheme, i'll move to figuring out how to suspend-to-ram (s3), then move to getting sound working.

as far as sound, i'm figuring that it is working already (i mean the driver is definitely going to be loaded), but i did check sound in youtube, and it wasn't working. i guess it's time to get back to it.