Updated and upgraded

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

I have reposted the Ubuntu GTK1.2 Remix ISO, this time with a lot of upgrades and a better, more complete software selection. Take a look at the remix page, and see if you care to try it once more.

The main additions are Beaver, XPaint, Ghostview and a slew of X-based application(let)s — mostly tools that either already come standard in a default Xorg installation, or minor additions that add a megabyte or two when it’s up and running. Don’t get all excited; it’s hardly worth mentioning, let alone getting excited over. And this is still the second-ugliest Ubuntu system ever invented … even if I did throw in feh and a menu link for changing the wallpaper. 😯

Here’s the culprit, running at 550Mhz on my trusty Thinkpad, with 192Mb in it:

With the exception of pauses to read the CD, it’s a fairly snappy system. There’s no mouseover lag or stutter when pages load in Dillo. And if you don’t need CD access to get a program going (like, when an application is opened twice, and the second one is taken from cache), it pops right up.

So altogether it’s exactly what I was looking for, or at least wanted from a low-low-end Ubuntu distro. I don’t presume to think you’ll find it attractive or appealing, but for my own purposes, it’s just right. And honestly, I’m only doing this to satisfy myself.

However … and you knew this was coming … Ubiquity just does not work. I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong or what magic spell I need to cast, but even when implanted on the system — as it is in this current ISO — it just craps out when it tries to get information about the user. Spattered characters spew across the text boxes. You have to kill X to get control of the system again. It’s not pretty.

And it’s not good enough, and there are no command-line options, so there’s little that can be done to make it work without it’s blessed GUI. I’ve left it on the ISO, however, in the odd chance that someone can find out what the quirk is, relay the information to me, and I can see if it cures the problem.

So this is just one step in the direction I originally intended: a one-shot, simple way to install a very basic system for very-low-end hardware, without relying on a command-line installation first. It represents the direction I want to go, but for now, Ubiquity has effectively blocked this route.

Time to figure out how to build my own alternate CD. Stay tuned. …