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-xfc…
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.
--
Regards,
Rony.
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