Hello All,
Someone wanted to install a light weight linux distro on his P2 hardware with 64 MB RAM. The Debian docs showed that the lowest RAM for Etch is 64 MB for Gnome/KDE desktops. However for lighter requirements, Etch with Xfce desktop would be fine. Next, downloaded Debian Etch-Xfce single CD iso from http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/4.0_r1/i386/iso-cd/debian-40r1-i386-xfce... and burned it into a CD.
At the boot prompt, the help menu's installation guide mentioned that at least 32 MB of RAM is required for this distro. The target system has 64 MB. Before actual deployment that is yet to take place, I installed it in my system to test it out. Installation was smooth. The internet was kept switched off to load everything from the CD itself.
It logged into a simple cute desktop that resembles Gnome and Mac. The top task bar of gnome and the bottom menu bar of mac. It comes preloaded with Iceweasel, the libre version of Firefox. The two missing packages were OpenOffice and IceDove (libre sibling of thunderbird).
The volume control and net monitor icon was added to the top panel. Not expecting much from the distro, just for kicks I tried to play some music files and to my utter surprise it played all of them, like wma, mp3. More surprises, it played mov, 3gp and even my DVD out of the box. W-O-W! No hassles of setting up repos and downloading extra codecs and libs. A very good feature for no-internet type installation.
It does not auto-mount CDs and DVDs but thats no problem, just manually mount it wherever you want to. Mounting it to /media/cdrom0 is just fine. The inbuilt media player can manually add the DVD to its playlist and play it.
The tricky part is with OpenOffice. The distro has a base installation of OO but its not complete and does not run. It has no icons in the menu listing. I tried it in command line using openoffice -writer or -calc but it would give errors of no JRE installed. However that is not the real problem which I found after installing sun-java5-jre. The bundled OO is a base package only.
For package downloads, first simply add the debian repos to the apt sources.lst. After an apt-get update, install synaptic, a gui for apt. Please note that this distro is more gnome oriented so avoid installing KDE based apps. as that will require heavy downloads of the KDE environment. Then scroll to the openoffice part in the list and select both packages for complete removal. Then manually install the complete deb packages (using sudo dpkg -i *.deb ) of OO from their site. I had the folder saved from my last Etch-KDE installation that needed these packages too. After installation OO did not start and got lost half way. However, a reboot of the system was all that was needed to get it up and running. It opens a default empty window for where we can select New -> Text/HTML/Spreadsheet/Presentation etc.
Then icedove was added using apt-get and thats all. A simple and fast installation of the latest multi-media ready distro core with a light-weight desktop. Later will post results from the actual installation on-site.