The beginning is a delicate time. So says the princess at the beginning of the Dune movie. And some truth can be found in that statement. Yesterday I treaded carefully into a delicate beginning when I went looking for a linux distribution to install on my ten year old Toshiba Satellite for our little “how low can you go” experiment. With only 128 megs of ram, a celeron 366 processor and only a wired network interface, it was kind of challenging to find the right distribution to get started.
I started off with Googling around for a linux Distro that could do the trick. A little googling around brought several possible candidates to the table like DSL (Damn Small Linux) and Puppylinux. I had tried the last one and was pretty pleased with the results some time ago. However its not a .debian based distro, so all the apt-get stuff that makes it so easy to install software on my system would not work. So i went looking for “ubuntu flavored” alternatives.
2 immediately popped to mind being Crunchbang Linux and ELbuntu. The difference with ‘”standard” ubuntu is that they sport a lighter GUI. Elbuntu uses the E17 gui (famous from the GOS linux version that was hyped last year). After downloading and burning both I came to the conclusion that my system was too light for these light distributions. Crunchbang took ages to boot, Elbuntu took forever to give me its installation screen.
So I thought I would start from the ground up and begin with a Command line version of Ubuntu and choose one of the seperate distro’s on top. Hitting F4 at the installation menu of Ubuntu server provided me with ‘install a minimal system” and that is what I went for. The installation took most of the evening and when I get home tonight I should have a working (command line only) system to start from.
So next up its time to choose the GUI and find one that makes the old sattelite a little usable.
Links : Crunchbang ELbuntu and the orginal article .