Minimal Linux install

[Zebo]

Hey guys, I was checking out distrowatch.com and there are quite a few making the choice rather daunting. I would like something minimal. Not minimal as in command line but I don't like those thousands of apps listed in the feature sets.

All I want is
-Open office
-an SSH tool
-A media player, audio and video with codecs
-FireFox
-DVD/CD stripper, ripper and encoder
-DVD/CD burning
-Image editing and viewing tool

And finally some type of GUI

What's best for me?

 

[n0cmonkey]

Debian
Slackware

 

[Zebo]

Thanks n0c.

 

[Nothinman]

Ubuntu is probably the best place to start but any distro will let you install as little or as much as you want.

 

[Zebo]

What if I want to use XFCE or ROX desktop? I like the sound of those desktops better.

 

[drag]

Ubuntu has a XFCE varient called Xubuntu. So for XFCE you may want to check that out. Probably check out Ubuntu until your more comfortable then try other things if you want.

For ROX (and XFCE) you probably want to take a look at the current Debian Testing system. It should have ROX aviable. Also there are a number of other interesting more 'low resource' systems like Fluxbox, WindowMaker (OpenSTEP-based system), Ratpoison, among many others.

 

[SleepWalkerX]

I'd just use Ubuntu as the base for a linux os. Then just install the media codecs and a dvd ripper (and k3b since its the greatest DVD/CD burning software ever, actually the lastest preview for the 1.0 release allows you to rip dvds so I've heard).

 

[Brazen]

The same answer people give to this same question 10 times a week on this forum to new linux users - Ubuntu.

 

[postmortemIA]

ubuntu has no appeal or charm for me. i wonder if that same people have traied anything else.
ubuntu is not a lightweight distro.

 

[Nothinman]

ubuntu is not a lightweight distro.

But it can be, you just have to prune back the packages after install if you don't like them. The only difference between Xubuntu, Ubuntu and Kubuntu are the default package sets.

 

[Noema]

Originally posted by: postmortemIA

ubuntu is not a lightweight distro.

Tell that to the Williamette P4 1.4GHz with 128MB of RAM I installed Xubuntu on, and which runs like a dream. I can even get Google Earth to run decently on it.

 

[postmortemIA]

Perhaps like a bad dream?

 

[Noema]

Originally posted by: postmortemIA
Perhaps like a bad dream?

Heh, actually Xubuntu rarely hits more than 50MBs of physical RAM usage.

Plus like 90% of the Ubuntu apps run on Xubuntu after being installed via synaptic and/ or apt-get.

 

[Nothinman]

Plus like 90% of the Ubuntu apps run on Xubuntu after being installed via synaptic and/ or apt-get.

Actually they all will, the only thing is that some of them will pull in different parts of Gnome so you might end up with all of Gnome installed too.

 

[sourceninja]

You can use the ubuntu server install or alternate install disk to install a bare bones shell only. Just like debain, they you can aptitude install everything you want. Of course if you dont want extra dependancys you never use wasting a few megs of hard drive space, you could waste compile time with gentoo.