LXDE

LXDE - another approach to a lightweight system. This is my current system running on both my laptop Latitude 2.0GHz 1GB ram and “homemade”-desktop 2.2GHz Dual Core 2GB ram.

This is not a how-to – yet. It is more a recipe on my Debian/LXDE GNU/Linux system.

Core

Debian Lenny is the core. I Use Debian Etch 4rc3 to install Standard system only. Then edited /etc/apt/sources.list to:

deb http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main contrib
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main contrib

deb http://ftp.debian.org/ lenny main contrib
deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/ lenny main contrib

I changed every Etch instance to Lenny, and ran

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

I now have a Debian Lenny (current) as a core-system installed. You might consider installing the core with the Debian Lenny RC instead of Etch.

I did however, get some errors with exim4 and some other packages related to mail-server-task. I just removed them.

Desktop Environment

The choice had already been made – LXDE, a lightweight full desktop environment, using Openbox as WM and PCManfm as a filemanager. PCManfm is a file-manager which also handles the desktop icons , background and volume-mounting-on-demand.

I updated /etc/apt/sources.list with

## LXDE
#deb http://people.linux.org.tw/~andrew/debian/lxde/ ./

Now, I run

sudo apt-get install xorg lxde conky

Restart, and login.

I got a 36.22 MB ram usage! Excellent!