livecd memory requirements

[Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

On Sun, 2007-04-15 at 09:50 -0700, Surajram Kumaravel wrote:
> I'm using an old computer and I couldn't use Ubuntu, Kubuntu  &
> Xubuntu live CDs till Memory was upgraded. I am talking about Ubuntu
> 5.1, Kubuntu 6.xx and Xubuntu 6 (For All these even the Installed
> version with 256 MB Swap space is a bit sluggish on my P3 500Mhz
> Computer. Suggetions to improve performance will be welcome. 

How much RAM do you have?

If you have less than 128MB[1], I would suggest:
- Using the (text-only) alternate (X/K/Ubuntu) CD for installing
  (or using the just released Debian Etch instead of Ubuntu)
- Doing server installation
- After the server install finishes, install (with apt-get)
  xorg, icewm, gdm
  - at this stage you need to setup X server, you can use
    e.g. dpkg-reconfigure to redo it.  For more speed and
    less memory usage, set the default display bitdepth to
    16bpp instead of the default 24/32
- Then you can do "/etc/init.d/gdm start", configure your new desktop
  and install more software.  I would probably start from installing
  a graphical package manager and a browser (if using Gtk apps,
  Epiphany-browser takes less RAM than Firefox and it uses
  the same HTML engine as Firefox)
    
[1] I might do it even with 128MB of RAM because browsers need
nowadays so much RAM that the more is left for them, the better.

I just did this with Debian Etch after the Xubuntu Feisty beta
live-CD didn't work with old 96MB machine (after taking >1 hour
to try to come up), but it should work for Ubuntu too, that doesn't
differ that much from Debian. :-)


	- Eero

PS. For a desktop the server install leaves some things like
inetd/portmap/nfs-common into boot which could be removed,
see /etc/rc2.d/README.  My machine doesn't have Bluetooth so
I removed BT service startups too.