The first Lubuntu test images are available

[Posted September 1, 2009 by corbet]

The Lubuntu project has announced the availability of its first test images. "The Lubuntu project started in March 2009, with the purpose of creating a lighter and less resource demanding alternative to the Xubuntu operating system, using the LXDE desktop environment. The ultimate goal of this project is to join the ranks of Kubuntu and Xubuntu and become an officially supported derivative of Ubuntu. The developers claim that, while Xubuntu is often represented as a lightweight distro, it actually fails to run on older hardware, so they are targeting their Linux distribution at older legacy computers and devices with less than 256 MB of RAM."

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The first Lubuntu test images are available

Posted Sep 1, 2009 17:21 UTC (Tue) by pr1268 (guest, #24648) [Link] (3 responses)

Does the Lubuntu Project see netbooks and/or smart phones as possible installation targets?

The first Lubuntu test images are available

Posted Sep 1, 2009 18:09 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (2 responses)

The original intention of LXDE itself is that it will provide a familar desktop environment for typical users in Asia, which tend to have older machines.

It's all about being pragmatic and giving people what they need. For example they didn't like GTK a whole lot, but used it because it's the most practical toolkit offered for what they want.

And it works out pretty good. It provides a nice desktop with Win9x-compariable desktop environment. It follows the modern desktop standards from freedesktop.org and you can add various Gnome components easily for more advanced functionality... like Network-Manager applet.

Unlike XFCE resource usage claims, which were always dubious at best, LXDE can actually provide a practical usable environment for machines with 128MB of RAM.

It's also nice for people wanting to escape from Gnome or whatever. It supports modern features, but also can be easily managed like Linux desktops of old. It uses OpenBox by default which totally kicks-ass if you want to have a customizable WM.

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Now I don't think that this really extends to SmartPhones at all. They need highly customized UI with all sorts of extra non-desktop functionality to make it practical to do all your messaging and audio stuff with just a dial pad and a touch screen.

As far as Netbooks. It works great and provides a nice familar desktop environment. Nothing special with no UI enhancements like Ubuntu's Netbook Remix that I am aware of.. of course you could use maximus and other ubuntu netbook features with it. It's compatible.

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That's just LXDE, though. I don't know what the ambitions of Lubuntu would be...

Not dubious in the least

Posted Sep 1, 2009 20:36 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (1 responses)

Unlike XFCE resource usage claims, which were always dubious at best, LXDE can actually provide a practical usable environment for machines with 128MB of RAM.

Why "dubious"? I've used XFCE on a machine with 128MB of RAM and it worked fine: you could have Firefox with a couple of tabs and a few applications (LyX, Calcoo) at the same time and it worked fine. Sure, you had to be careful: one extra tab and it swapped like crazy, but that happens with 512MB too if you do not watch it -- evince is a hog.

This was with lenny, I don't know if squeeze has changed things a lot but I suspect not. Well yes: that thanks to the new netbooks now I have 1 GB of RAM, but I still use XFCE because it is great.

Not dubious in the least

Posted Sep 1, 2009 21:57 UTC (Tue) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link]

XFCE is lightweight enough, but Xubuntu has some other baggage: see http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20090504#feature for a comparison with Debian XFCE and guidance on how to strip down Xubuntu.

The first Lubuntu test images are available

Posted Sep 1, 2009 18:06 UTC (Tue) by dennisk (guest, #12308) [Link]

Don't see why not. I've used LXDE on a vintage ThinkPad 240 (300MB Celeron, 128MB RAM) and I was very pleased with it.

Dennisk

Some other light Ubuntu variants

Posted Sep 1, 2009 18:45 UTC (Tue) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link] (2 responses)

U-Lite and Crunchbang are also worth trying - Crunchbang is quite nice and has a live CD, while U-Lite is good for more low-end systems.

Crunching

Posted Sep 1, 2009 20:45 UTC (Tue) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (1 responses)

I recently played with Crunchbang in a VM that allowed the apparent memory to be set. The desktop still started and ran with a 56Mb RAM (!), provided the installation was first run with a higher RAM setting, but it was unusably slow. With 128Mb it was actually reasonable, but the host was a modern Core2 machine. A real old system with that memory size would probably be worse.

Crunching

Posted Sep 1, 2009 23:41 UTC (Tue) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link]

Compcache, Celeron 600 and 128 MB of physical RAM here. LXDE is very nice for such an old
machine. I'm impressed.

The first Lubuntu test images are available

Posted Sep 1, 2009 18:52 UTC (Tue) by allesfresser (guest, #216) [Link]

Actual announcement is here: http://blog.lxde.org/?p=514

The first Lubuntu test images are available

Posted Sep 1, 2009 19:17 UTC (Tue) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]

Following the scheme of Kbuntu and XbuntuLbuntu, now with 50% more Linux in it. that'd be cool :-)

The first Lubuntu test images are available

Posted Sep 1, 2009 21:03 UTC (Tue) by macson_g (guest, #12717) [Link]

As far as I remember, the purpose of Xfce (started in 1998-1999) was to provide
> lightweight desktop environment for various *NIX systems [that] loads and executes applications fast, while conserving system resources.

Now Xfce
> actually fails to run on older hardware,

so in 2006 LXDE kicks in, which claims to be
> extremely fast, performing and energy saving desktop environment.

If this will going to continue, I will have to formulate my own law about desktop environments bloating each 7 years, that together with Moore's law and Page's law will create the "tree laws of computing"