My plans for this Thanksgiving took me out of town for several days…but I had a lot of work to do, so I began to prep my laptop for the trip. Now this is a pretty old Dell Inspiron 8200…256 MB of RAM, 1.6 GHz processor…nothing grand. Usually I keep Puppy Linux on it, but I really needed to do some music composition for a class, and the application I prefer, NoteEdit, isn’t available in the Puppy repos. Compiling was going to be pain, so I decided to install Debian Etch and use Fluxbox (one of my favorite minimal WMs) along with Rox to manage my desktop and files. Long story short, my hard drive died during the install (No fault of Debian, I’m sure). That left me with my wife’s laptop, a even older Dell Inspiron with 128 MB of RAM and a 800 MHz processor. I had remembered that there was an Ubuntu spin-off called Fluxbuntu that used Fluxbox for the window manager and Rox for the desktop/filer. Seemed like what I wanted so I figured, why not give it a try?

Installation
The install took about 30 minutes, I didn’t encounter any hitches along the way. On first boot I couldn’t get anything greater than an 800×600 resolution on my monitor no matter how I tweaked my xorg.conf file, so I booted up in Puppy (don’t think I’ll be throwing away that CD anytime soon!) and copied the relevant sections from its xorg.conf to the Fluxbuntu xorg.conf. Turns out Fluxbuntu had selected the incorrect video driver for my card. Once that was ironed out, everything proceeded smoothly.

First Impressions
The bootsplash is very nice, with an unconventional progress indicator in the shape of a stopwatch that “counts down” to the login screen. I’m not quite sure what app they’re using for the login screen, but it’s not GDM. On first logon you’re presented with a light-feeling, clean desktop with just a few icons. It’s warm and inviting, and not all overwhelming like some other desktops can be. The GTK theme is pleasant and matches the Fluxbox theme well. The menu is well laid out and accessing applications was very easy and intuitive. I liked the Kazehakase web-browser (it’s definitely light, and offers a slew of features) but I really needed a couple extensions, so I broke down and installed Firefox almost immediately. I noticed OpenOffice was absent and that Abiword was offered as a word processor. Dia was included as a drawing program, and ImageMagick was available for other images. A few system utilities were present, but other than that, not very many applications are installed by default. This is a good thing in my book, though…I think Fluxbuntu is meant as a starting point to really customize your computing experience.

One Week Later
Other than my video driver issue, I have had zero problems with this distro on this machine. It worked flawlessly for me while I was away from home, and provided me with a reliable system that I counted on to get work done. The Ubuntu base really makes it a powerful starting point, and allowed me to easily obtain the applications that I have to use to accomplish my goals. Now, this machine is very old, and even with this distro on it I wouldn’t call performance “snappy,” but it was perfectly acceptable, even with a few applications running at the same time. One really cool feature: the Fluxbox menu updates automatically when you add new apps! It’s a very nice, polished touch. Since this this is a lightweight distro, not a lot of advanced GUI utilities are offered. You’ll need to get down and dirty at the command line to add/delete users, change passwords, and perform other administrative tasks. However, the GUI tool Fluxconf is included to configure Fluxbox.

If you’re looking for a powerful, few-hassles, aesthetically pleasing, low-impact distro…give Fluxbuntu a whirl. It’s not officially released yet (I downloaded a Release Candidate based on Ubuntu 7.10) but it’s more than stable. Read the release notes as there a couple bugs related to automounting and menu-updating that are easily fixed. All-in-all, this a fantastic distro aimed at users with a moderate knowledge of Linux, or at least a willingness to learn. The distro stays true to its slogan, “Lightweight. Productive. Agile. Efficient. Ubuntu.” Fluxbuntu will be staying on this machine for a while.

Official Fluxbuntu Website Check out screenshots below!

Filed under: Minimal WMs