Against all odds, Ubuntulite fights back

Edit: Unfortunately, the images originally included in this post are gone, because of hosting problems in late 2009. My apologies.

This is probably the most boring screenshot ever, but it’s an important one.

That’s Ubuntulite 7.04, a fresh installation and a working system. Laugh if you want, but that’s an important step.

Shae Smittle in the Ubuntulite group has put together a workable deb that, when installed via aptitude, brings in the entire framework for an ultralight system. It’s built around Openbox with XDM, and has a nice array of default applications to keep your old Pentium II in business.

Installation is not difficult, and should be something most beginners should be able to handle.

Add these lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list file

deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/ubuntulite feisty main
deb-src http://download.tuxfamily.org/ubuntulite feisty main

Install the apt-key for this repository.

wget http://download.tuxfamily.org/ubuntulite/37FADB75.key -O- | sudo apt-key add -

Make sure that’s all on one line, and don’t miss the trailing hyphen. Watch for the password prompt too. After that,

sudo apt-get install ubuntulite-desktop

And the magic begins. Shae says an installation script is in the works, to further lighten the burden of installing.

At present it’s very rough around the edges. Right now what the project needs most is an individual look. Some prefit wallpaper are on the group pages, so if you want to try your hand at creating GTK1/2 or Openbox themes specially for the project, now’s the time to roll up your sleeves.

Aside from that, give it a try and post some feedback to the group. This could be a chance to throw in an opinion early, and get things pushed in your direction.

Edit: Here’s a better screenshot, just so you don’t feel all brokenhearted about that other one.

That’s with lxpanel added, and the Debian GTK2 theme to match the debfskin theme bundled with XMMS in Ubuntu, and the Mister theme from box-look.org. Thank goodness for box-look.org. …

Of course, all these rounded corners and shaded buttons are a bit hefty for a machine with only 2Mb of shared video memory. Time to lighten the load. …