Xubuntu Team Announces "Xubuntu Core"

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Xubuntu Team Announces "Xubuntu Core"

The latest Ubuntu-related announcement this week is the debut of Xubuntu Core...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Xubuntu-Core-Announced

[uid313]

Pointless?

Wouldn't it be better with just a metapackage?

So you can download Ubuntu Core and then run:
sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop-core.

[user82]

600MB for Xubuntu core.
Not too long ago a full Ubuntu with "office suite, media players, or other software" fit on a CD, what has increased so much in size recently
(this is an actual question, not a rethorical one, I'd like to know)

[DIRT]

non pae?

I'm one of those still using pentuim II laptops. Handy at college, no one wants to steal those from you. But on a lot of old hardware pae kernels will kernel panic no matter what you give for boot options. Non pae would be handy in some cases. But I think this is a ubuntu thing where they no longer have non pae kernels

[GreatEmerald]

I'm one of those still using pentuim II laptops. Handy at college, no one wants to steal those from you. But on a lot of old hardware pae kernels will kernel panic no matter what you give for boot options. Non pae would be handy in some cases. But I think this is a ubuntu thing where they no longer have non pae kernels

Hah, well, for things like that you should be using Puppy Linux or Gentoo. Things will get much worse for you in the future otherwise. For instance, RHEL7 not only doesn't support non-PAE, but it doesn't support i686 altogether!

[d2kx]

Wouldn't it be better with just a metapackage?

So you can download Ubuntu Core and then run:
sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop-core.

Please, let me copy & paste the site linked in the article.

"The recommended way is to download the mini.iso, install, and when prompted, install the Xubuntu minimal installation task. If you?d prefer to wait until after the installer finishes to install the Xubuntu core task, you can simply type sudo apt-get install xubuntu-core^ (don?t forget the caret!) and away it?ll go."

[duby229]

Oh man, I would hate to install gentoo on a P2. Unless of course if it was built on a different machine, then that would be ok. I just wouldn't even consider letting a P2 try to build a gentoo system. It'd take weeks.

[AlexFonewn]

Hah, well, for things like that you should be using Puppy Linux or Gentoo. Things will get much worse for you in the future otherwise. For instance, RHEL7 not only doesn't support non-PAE, but it doesn't support i686 altogether!

I know for sure that Xubuntu (Ubuntu) up to 14.04 LTS (at least, since this is the one I have installed in an old Dell intel Core M with 1.5GB RAM) and Arch Linux (up to just a few months ago, 3 I would say) support non PAE systems.

Research a little and if you are not able to find it, reply here and I will tell you how to enable nonPAE on Ubuntu.

Both Xubuntu and Arch work just fine with XFCE in that old laptop.

[Luke]

Really old machine run best with older versions of Linux

Hah, well, for things like that you should be using Puppy Linux or Gentoo. Things will get much worse for you in the future otherwise. For instance, RHEL7 not only doesn't support non-PAE, but it doesn't support i686 altogether!

A machine that old won't play online video, thus does not need a modern (html5) browser. It is also crucial not to install flash, in fact you want to ensure that online video cannot be played so as not to make the machine unresponsive. With no need for video support, a P-II is not tied to the use of modern Linux distros at all. You can still get download images for things like older versions of Ubuntu (ALL of them last I checked), and DSL (Damned Small Linux) is essentially a still-supported version of Debian Woody. DSL will work when you do not even have enough RAM for Ubuntu. Ubuntu Warty can supposedly install and run GNOME 2 with just 64MB of RAM, but DSL will outperform it and is supported today.

I've got one of these machines with 192 MB RAM and Ubuntu Jaunty on it, fully encrypted at that and it works. I used it for audio and photo editing during the protest against the G20 summit in Pittsburgh in 2009. I knew that would escalate to a battle, so I needed an expendable machine. It's job was to let me quickly encrypt my photos and audio so if police raided activists homes that night they would be unable to get my photos and audio from wiped devices.

While most distros that work well on these machines (other than DSL) are not supported today, their current descendants do not support these machines properly, either not running or running at a snail's pace. Especially bad is things like graphics that attempt to run LLVMpipe instead of falling back to straight VESA. The main trick in VESA (as in DSL) is to get the screen resolution right, in Ubuntu Jaunty you can do that in xorg.conf, in DSL you get a GUI to set that up.

A word on websites: make sure you turn javascript off before going to any JS intensive site like Twitter, or the machine will essentially stop! Twitter has done something stupid, and their JS will slow a 1.6GHZ Intel Atom to a crawl. A P-II would be expected to essentially freeze on Twitter JS. Consider using mobile versions of websites, some ARM devices running at nearly 1GHZ with one core are no faster than your P-II.

All of these slow machines I normally set up the OS on something far faster, then move the hard drive to the target machine. Gentoo with a very old kernel and MATE would offer some interesting possiblities if you load the machine with all the RAM it will take first. The P-II can use the i-686 optimizations and MMX, but does not have SSE or anything newer. Speaking of MMX, ffmpeg can use it when SSE is not available. While I suspect no video will be playable from a browser, these machines were able to play QVGA (320x240) video in their time and should play it fine in mplayer, probably better than they did in Quicktime. Some have reported the 366MHZ versions as even being able to play back DVD's which use a ligher codec than the mpeg-4 standard of circa 2000 for web video.

Never throw these out! Nobody knows how long it will remain possible to buy computers with unlocked bootloaders new, and I would take a Pentium II over a Microsoft Surface ARM (locked) tablet any day.

[kaidenshi]

Hah, well, for things like that you should be using Puppy Linux or Gentoo. Things will get much worse for you in the future otherwise. For instance, RHEL7 not only doesn't support non-PAE, but it doesn't support i686 altogether!

Slackware still supports machines all the way back to i486, so there's that. Or for something a little different, OpenBSD works on non-PAE machines as well. I have both running on a PIII Dell Latitude laptop. They can handle basic tasks very well, especially using a lightweight WM like Fluxbox or one of the tiling WMs.