Toy Nemesis Army

Here is my ongoing Fluxbuntu Adventure on one page.

I have recently acquired an old HP Compaq from my work.  It has 256 MB RAM, 40.0 GB HDD, Intel Celeron Processor, and that’s about all I looked at to know when I got the thing home, I was going to put a low resource Linux install on it.  I had been researching one such install, called Fluxbuntu.  Well, I already burned the ISO, which is around 310 MB, very nice and waayyy smaller than a similar Ubuntu ISO, weighing in at about 696 MB (+/- 5%-ish).  Well, I brought the old thing home and tested out the Windows XPSP2 (I think).  The boot took about two minutes, log in another two minutes to set up everything that was installed from the company I work for.  This thing was sluggish like no other.  Now, I had previously tried Fluxbuntu on an old Tablet PC that I had lying around, and it would not install, so I just stuck Ubuntu on it, and it runs smoothly.  This made me slightly nervous to use partition the whole hard drive and get rid of everything.  I did it eventually, and the install started and ran very quickly.  It stopped however, nearly finished at 90% and sat for over an hour at 90%.  I restarted the install three times, before finally it worked!

Fluxbuntu Start Up

I was so excited to finally have the system run.  The computer restarted, and to my amazement the boot time was less then 30 seconds and I was totally logged in to my new Fluxbuntu system!  Amazing!  The graphics are really nice, and there is plenty of support for it, as it is based off the popular Ubuntu.  I even installed Globulation, a pretty awesome game, which runs pretty fast (unless you have more than five computer players!)  I like the browser, although it could use some more features, but it does have some unique things.  The tabs could use some work as well, as they seem slightly jumbled, and sometimes can be hard to use.  I have not looked at all the features of Fluxbuntu, but it seems to be a nice, extremely lightweight, mostly stable system.  I have used e-mail, Internet, games, and messed with desktop settings.  It uses Fluxbox (hence the name FLUXbuntu) as a window manager.  It is a little different, due to the fact that there is no start button, or application menu on a bar at the top/bottom of the screen.  You simply right click anywhere on the screen and BANG, there’s your menu, with all your programs.  You have Synaptic Package Manager to install programs, pretty much everything you can get in Ubuntu is there.  The only problems that I have found with it have already been reported as known bugs, and can be found and most likely solved here.

Fluxbuntu

This system is awesome, but I would recommend to experienced Linux users, and make sure you back up everything first.  Also, if you have another Linux flavor, I would recommend trying Fluxbox out first, to see if the interface is for you.  It is a little different, but is easy to get used to.  Anyone with an adventurous spirit, a low resource system, and some Linux and command line knowledge should definitely give Fluxbuntu a try.

Fluxbuntu Two Weeks Later

Well, it’s been about two weeks since I installed Fluxbuntu on my desktop, and now my laptop as well!  I’ve played games, downloaded themes, icon sets, pictures, installed programs, used word processors, and countless other things.  I absolutely love how fast and lightweight it is.  DO NOT INSTALL IF YOU DON’T LIKE USING THE TERMINAL A LOT!!  That is the one problem with it.  There are lots of strange and different things to n00bs and unexperienced users.  I had trouble finding things too, and I have used Ubuntu and other linux flavors.  Use the web browser, file explorer and Fluxbox on a Ubuntu machine before trying this, and make sure you have the Fluxbuntu community saved in your favorites, because you’ll need it. 

It is an amazing OS, although slightly harder to use, it is surprisingly user friendly in most aspects.  You can drag files to the program and open them, change any icon on all or one specific file, change themes, etc.  It is really nice, and on a 40 GB HDD, 512 RAM, Intel Celeron HP Compaq, it is amazingly fast at boot and while using, even while playing Globulation and changing themes, and installing new programs.  It is very useful for reviving that old desktop or laptop. 

Oh, and another note, there is no LiveCD, sorry guys.  It is text based install, keeping the ISO very small (307 MB).