More on lightweight Linux distros

After some initial experiments with Zenwalk, I have tried 3 more lightweight Linux distros, with the aim of finding something that will run well on an older PC with only 256MB of RAM, but provide a user friendly interface and be capable of performing day to day office tasks.

They are:

Here is my very superficial review, please don’t take it too seriously.

Puppy Linux is the smallest of the three and the ISO file is only 131MB. It is optimized for running from CD or USB. Although it tries to be user friendly it is some way behind the other two for non-technical users. There are lots of strange application names and icons in the menus, so for now I’m putting that aside.

lubuntu is a project that is intended to lead to an official derivative of the Ubuntu operating system that is “lighter, less resource hungry and more energy-efficient”, using the LXDE desktop environment. I installed this to hard disk using an Oracle VirtualBox Virtual Machine.

Pros:
On booting it consumed only 56MB of RAM so there was plenty left over for running applications.
Cons:
It uses chromium as the default browser, and this doesn’t have Adobe Flash installed.

Peppermint OS has the goal of providing a fast, web-centric operating system that’s easy to learn and effective when put in use. The default desktop interface is LXDE. I’ve also run this as a virtual machine.

Pros:
On booting, it consumed 86MB of RAM, a little higher than lubuntu but still very reasonable.
Firefox is the default browser and Adobe Flash is also installed.
There is an update manager that lets you know when package updates are available and a very nice software installer for locating and installing additional applications.
Cons:
I’ll post them here after I’ve spent some more time investigating…

In conclusion Peppermint OS looks like the best option for my requirements at the moment, but it is only through day-to-day use that I’ll uncover any issues.

Installing VirtualBox Guest Additions into Zenwalk

Zenwalk linux is designed to be fast, lightweight and run on older machines (so it is less resource intensive).

That makes it an ideal candidate if you need to run Linux in a Virtual Machine like the excellent VirtualBox.

To install new software into Zenwalk, you need to run Netpkg, and you will probably want to install the VirtualBox guest additions to take advantage of mouse pointer integration. Before installing the guest additions, you will need to install the kernelsource package, which contains the headers you need when the guest additions installer tried to compile.

Finding top level directory sizes with Linux

If you need to find out where the hard drive space on your Linux server has been taken up, here is a suggestion.

From the root directory if you use:

sudo du -h

You get an unmanageably long list of all the subdirectories on your system.
If you direct the output to a file however, you can use egrep to provide a useful summary, just showing the totals for the top level directories:

sudo du -h > ~/dirsize.txt
egrep ‘^[0-9.MKG]+[[:space:]]+./[a-z]+$’ dirsize.txt