Ubuntu "Lite" :)

[agger]

I think this is a great idea!



My own experience with "lite" is this:



I have an IBM Aptiva, 450 MHz, 128 megas of RAM, which we like to use

for Internet, text processing, instant messaging, etc.



Normally I use a modern Centrino laptop running Ubuntu.

At first, I did a normal Ubuntu install on the Aptiva, but as soon as
you have more

than a couple of tabs open in Firefox, or several applications running
at once, 

it simply dies for lack of memory.



I then followed the instructions on installing Ubuntu for low memory
systems 

discussed here:



http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=8338&page=10&pp=10



It works, but it's not easy to get everything right: I couldn't get my
sound card to work, nor could I get it to set background image or
colour.



Then I tried other Linux distros, such ad dyne:bolic, which runs from a
live CD and is a quick'n'dirty way of getting it to work - it does have
the disadvantage of crashing once in a while.



Now, I've ended up leaving Linux and giving FreeBSD a spin instead, and
my conlcusion up till now is this:



FreeBSD may be more suitable for low-end machines than Linux.

Like I said, the system simply dies if I run on a normal Ubuntu
installation with GNOME for more than five minutes or so.



With IceWM, things are better, but this definitely doesn't work "out of
the box".



With FreeBSD, my computer performs -excellently- running either KDE or
Gnome - I can run Mozilla, emacs, office applications, whatever, and it
all works very reasonably, and the system never dies.



The installation is NOT very straightforward or "out-of-the-box", one
might add, but on the other hand the installation handbook is
excellent.



I don't know why this is - possibly, the FreeBSD kernel is less
demanding, or possibly the xorg port for FreeBSD performs better? Maybe
Linux is (for some reason) less suited for low-end systems?



I think that making an Ubuntu lite is a really good idea, and will
probably also want to give it a spin - but if you need to work with
low-end computers, perhaps FreeBSD is more suited for the task than
Linux; and maybe an "Ubuntu Lite" might simply be a port of the normal
Ubuntu installation and setup to FreeBSD?



regards

Carsten Agger


-- 
agger