The purpose of Ubuntu Lite (as I see it). Is to develop a version of
Ubuntu that will run on your Older systems. It is not another dsl,
knoppix or whatever, the aim is not to make another superlight OS. The
aim is to keep the spirit of Ubuntu of a Humane version of linux that
anyone can use (and I mean anyone from Grandmothers to refugees) and
spread it to your older systems.
If we have to set low end specifications then we are talking pentium
200mhz 64mb ram (though this may be unrealistic) and 1.5gb hard drive.
Also the distro has to fit to a standard CD. Above all it has to be
useable (browse the internet, look at word documents, etc) and easy to
use (aim is for little to no computer experince).
The most important specification of our target "minimum requirements" is the amount of RAM. Some projects I looked at following links from Ingo Lantschner's post were considering a 32MB RAM minimum and the Ubuntu-Lite wiki mentions 64MB. I do not think it practical to run OpenOffice in either case as the Resident Set Size of OOo is about 50MB and some RAM will be required for the window manager etc. (We only want to use swap for programs that are currently not active or things will become painfully slow)
Is the ability to _output_ files in .doc format really a requirement? AbiWord can do rtf which MSWord can read and does not require as much RAM. The RSS is about 12MB. Other word processors require even less.
One thing we should decide is what we mean by _Ubuntu_ lite as distinct from say Sarge lite. Is it the use of the Ubuntu repositories, the Ubuntu installer, or the way Ubuntu handles hardware. Will we use an auto mounter to mount floppy disks or CDs?
Ken Caldwell I have a distribution based on Debian Sarge that takes up 828MB of disk space for the installed files and allowing for a swap partition and space for the User's files would fit on a 1.5GB HDD. Another similar distro intended for higher spec'ed machines (128MB RAM and > 1.8GB HDD ) installs about 1.2GB of files.
Ill answer one of these. What I mean by ubuntu_lite is a version of Ubuntu that is for the legacy hardware that is Useable. So it would use the ubuntu hardware handler, it would use the ubuntu repositories and it would hope to be included in the ubuntu installer (though that would depend on Ubuntu).
The idea of attaching to a major updated release is so that we have the bug fixes, hardware drivers and support of the ubuntu release. Also it is to premote the project within the linux community.
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