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"Lubuntu can comfortably run on as little as 256MB of RAM." It can although I'd call it jogging rather than running. It can work on a P3 coppermine class lapto

"Lubuntu can comfortably run on as little as 256MB of RAM." It can although I'd call it jogging rather than running. It can work on a P3 coppermine class laptop very nicely. However, a stock Lubuntu live CD does not come with LibreOffice. Gnumeric is a nice spreadsheet, but Abiword normally does not have built in facilities for mathematical formulas, or for making drawings. There appears [1] to be no presentation application. I hope the City are making some training materials available along with advice on installing LibreOffice. LO will jog on a 900MHz p3/256Mb one application at a time. [1] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Lubuntu/Setup#Applications https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Lubuntu/Setup#Applications Edit: I should say on P4 upwards or a Centrino laptop with 512Mb it will fly, and run LO fine with multiple applications.

mtgx 13y ago
I think at this point the apps themselves have a bigger impact than the OS. Websites can easily take 50-100 MB of RAM these days, each. Open a few of those, and you can already slow down your PC with low RAM. All of these "low-end" operating systems should have at least 1 GB of RAM as the bare minimum, and something with a more modern OS like Ubuntu or Windows 7 should use at least 2 GB of RAM, otherwise you have the same problem.
- dllthomas 13y ago
  Eh, just run Lynx...
- tsahyt 13y ago
  What sorts of websites are we talking about here? I understand that some websites have to transfer a couple of megabytes to be displayed (though most of that is media content anyway) but how does that end up occupying 100MB of RAM? That's roughly an order of magnitude more than I'd like a website to take, except for when we're talking streaming media obviously.
  - peterjmag 13y ago
    Looking at Chrome's Task Manager: my Gmail tab weighs in at 255 MB. Facebook is #2, at 168 MB. All that client-side JS gets pretty heavy. Interestingly, #3 is the home page of an old blogspot.com blog. It's mostly just text and a few inline images, and it still somehow manages to occupy 132 MB of RAM.
    - rotnewson 13y ago
      I'm guessing this is either because of chrome's sandboxed tabs or the amount of RAM you have on your computer (or a combination of both). Firefox is lighter on the RAM usage these days especially with more tabs because of the sandboxing.
  - com2kid 13y ago
    I use a web IM client, it can easily consume hundreds upon hundreds of megabytes if left open for a few days, and that is just to send small snippets of text back and forth! About:Memory in Firefox right now, with nothing other than this reply box open, shows JS using 67.29MB and well over 100MB of memory used for other purposes. (Likely this is left over from tabs I have closed)
    - PavlovsCat 13y ago
      About:Memory in Firefox right now, with nothing other than this reply box open, shows JS using 67.29MB and well over 100MB of memory used for other purposes. (Likely this is left over from tabs I have closed) I think it's just general overhead, since I have similar figures when starting FF fresh with no tabs. If you look at "window-objects" under explicit allocations, you can see the memory for individual pages; the page of your parent comment weighs 2.2 MB for me. But that's without history... when you click links, it will keep the previous pages cached, and I think that is what can really eat a lot of memory real quick. But I would also hope that memory gets released without much of a fuss? I don't know that, but if the RAM is made available when system resources get low, I'd say cache away, since unused RAM just eats electricity for nothing :P
  - mtgx 13y ago
swah 13y ago
Quite sincerely, I just tried switching to Ubuntu 13.04 (from Win7) on my gaming machine (4GB Ram, some Nvidia card that I can play BF3 very well), and it doesn't "Run" like Windows either. Chrome is slow to start, videos don't load properly, ejecting the pendrive fails...
- NoodleIncident 13y ago
  Did you get the proprietary drivers for that Nvidia card? They can't legally be included in the distro itself, you have to go get them, which is a shame.
  - quaint- 13y ago
    The situation described by GP is so ridiculous that it's unlikely to be true, which is why I wouldn't recommend anyone to waste their time trying to solve the mentioned "problems". I mean, really, why would anyone switch from Windows to Ubuntu on a gaming machine? Just think about it for a sec. (Videos not loading or USB not working are issues the OEM are supposed to handle. The fact that someone like GP can't tell even the series of their GPU hints strongly toward them using a prebuilt computer - yet expecting to be able to work as their own Linux OEM, which one could argue is more difficult than being a Windows OEM.)
    - Discordian93 13y ago
      I installed ubuntu alongside windows on my alienware, and I'm quite happy with it, I only switch to windows to play dota 2 and amalur, for browsing, other games and miscellaneous tasks I use linux.
    - venomsnake 13y ago
      Well I did. So far I have close to 100 native games and I have been able to play a lot of recent games with playonlinux. So not bad at all. One of the few things missing is decent Everything clone for linux - something that reads directly from the journal and is able to find files instantly by names without useless indexing of the contents.
yuhong 13y ago
This reminds me that the i815 chipset is limited to 512MB RAM total, which was used in lots of P3 systems.
D9u 13y ago
Installing LibreOffice on Lubuntu is so easy that even a caveman (me) can do it. 1.) Open Synaptic Package Manager. 2.) Enter Admin Password. 3.) Type "LibreOffice" into the search field. 4.) Follow the on screen prompts, clicking appropriately. All of the various Lubuntu applications I've tried run quite well on my nearly 5 year old Atom N270(800MHz) 1GB RAM netbook. Seriously, if a user has rudimentary experience with WinXP then Lubuntu will not be too much to assimilate, and the only caveats are proprietary applications, yet there exists workarounds for most, such as comphoilio's netflix-desktop - which uses a special version of wine to run Silverlight and its necessary components - to enable viewing of Netflix DRM content on Debian based systems. http://www.compholio.com/netflix-desktop/ http://www.compholio.com/netflix-desktop/
- keithpeter 13y ago
  Absolutely! But many of the target audience may have very little experience of installing software and may need a screen cam / leaflet along the lines of your instructions. Last time I tried Lubuntu, I had to manually install the appropriate spell checker for my language (en-gb). Many will want ms core fonts as well. I agree the whole thing is one side of A4 with a few scren shots. PS: Atom based netbooks with 1Gb are much more capable than P3/256Mb, people with such netbooks will have no issues at all with Lubuntu. I'm running ubuntustudio fine on this Samsung NC10.
vanderZwan 13y ago
"Abiword normally does not have built in facilities for mathematical formulas" The Xerox Alto had this in 1982[1]. NINETEEN FREAKING EIGHTY TWO. How is it possible that any WYSIWYG word processor is allowed to ship without this? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODZBL80JPqw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODZBL80JPqw
- girvo 13y ago
  Because AbiWords codebase is so painful, adding it is more trouble than it's worth. I tried to port it to elementary with a new UI. Dear god.

mtgx 13y ago

I think at this point the apps themselves have a bigger impact than the OS. Websites can easily take 50-100 MB of RAM these days, each. Open a few of those, and you can already slow down your PC with low RAM. All of these "low-end" operating systems should have at least 1 GB of RAM as the bare minimum, and something with a more modern OS like Ubuntu or Windows 7 should use at least 2 GB of RAM, otherwise you have the same problem.

dllthomas 13y ago
Eh, just run Lynx...
tsahyt 13y ago
What sorts of websites are we talking about here? I understand that some websites have to transfer a couple of megabytes to be displayed (though most of that is media content anyway) but how does that end up occupying 100MB of RAM? That's roughly an order of magnitude more than I'd like a website to take, except for when we're talking streaming media obviously.
- peterjmag 13y ago
  Looking at Chrome's Task Manager: my Gmail tab weighs in at 255 MB. Facebook is #2, at 168 MB. All that client-side JS gets pretty heavy. Interestingly, #3 is the home page of an old blogspot.com blog. It's mostly just text and a few inline images, and it still somehow manages to occupy 132 MB of RAM.
  - rotnewson 13y ago
    I'm guessing this is either because of chrome's sandboxed tabs or the amount of RAM you have on your computer (or a combination of both). Firefox is lighter on the RAM usage these days especially with more tabs because of the sandboxing.
- com2kid 13y ago
  I use a web IM client, it can easily consume hundreds upon hundreds of megabytes if left open for a few days, and that is just to send small snippets of text back and forth! About:Memory in Firefox right now, with nothing other than this reply box open, shows JS using 67.29MB and well over 100MB of memory used for other purposes. (Likely this is left over from tabs I have closed)
  - PavlovsCat 13y ago
    About:Memory in Firefox right now, with nothing other than this reply box open, shows JS using 67.29MB and well over 100MB of memory used for other purposes. (Likely this is left over from tabs I have closed) I think it's just general overhead, since I have similar figures when starting FF fresh with no tabs. If you look at "window-objects" under explicit allocations, you can see the memory for individual pages; the page of your parent comment weighs 2.2 MB for me. But that's without history... when you click links, it will keep the previous pages cached, and I think that is what can really eat a lot of memory real quick. But I would also hope that memory gets released without much of a fuss? I don't know that, but if the RAM is made available when system resources get low, I'd say cache away, since unused RAM just eats electricity for nothing :P
- mtgx 13y ago

swah 13y ago

Quite sincerely, I just tried switching to Ubuntu 13.04 (from Win7) on my gaming machine (4GB Ram, some Nvidia card that I can play BF3 very well), and it doesn't "Run" like Windows either. Chrome is slow to start, videos don't load properly, ejecting the pendrive fails...

NoodleIncident 13y ago
Did you get the proprietary drivers for that Nvidia card? They can't legally be included in the distro itself, you have to go get them, which is a shame.
- quaint- 13y ago
  The situation described by GP is so ridiculous that it's unlikely to be true, which is why I wouldn't recommend anyone to waste their time trying to solve the mentioned "problems". I mean, really, why would anyone switch from Windows to Ubuntu on a gaming machine? Just think about it for a sec. (Videos not loading or USB not working are issues the OEM are supposed to handle. The fact that someone like GP can't tell even the series of their GPU hints strongly toward them using a prebuilt computer - yet expecting to be able to work as their own Linux OEM, which one could argue is more difficult than being a Windows OEM.)
  - Discordian93 13y ago
    I installed ubuntu alongside windows on my alienware, and I'm quite happy with it, I only switch to windows to play dota 2 and amalur, for browsing, other games and miscellaneous tasks I use linux.
  - venomsnake 13y ago
    Well I did. So far I have close to 100 native games and I have been able to play a lot of recent games with playonlinux. So not bad at all. One of the few things missing is decent Everything clone for linux - something that reads directly from the journal and is able to find files instantly by names without useless indexing of the contents.

yuhong 13y ago

This reminds me that the i815 chipset is limited to 512MB RAM total, which was used in lots of P3 systems.

D9u 13y ago

Installing LibreOffice on Lubuntu is so easy that even a caveman (me) can do it. 1.) Open Synaptic Package Manager. 2.) Enter Admin Password. 3.) Type "LibreOffice" into the search field. 4.) Follow the on screen prompts, clicking appropriately. All of the various Lubuntu applications I've tried run quite well on my nearly 5 year old Atom N270(800MHz) 1GB RAM netbook. Seriously, if a user has rudimentary experience with WinXP then Lubuntu will not be too much to assimilate, and the only caveats are proprietary applications, yet there exists workarounds for most, such as comphoilio's netflix-desktop - which uses a special version of wine to run Silverlight and its necessary components - to enable viewing of Netflix DRM content on Debian based systems. http://www.compholio.com/netflix-desktop/ http://www.compholio.com/netflix-desktop/

keithpeter 13y ago
Absolutely! But many of the target audience may have very little experience of installing software and may need a screen cam / leaflet along the lines of your instructions. Last time I tried Lubuntu, I had to manually install the appropriate spell checker for my language (en-gb). Many will want ms core fonts as well. I agree the whole thing is one side of A4 with a few scren shots. PS: Atom based netbooks with 1Gb are much more capable than P3/256Mb, people with such netbooks will have no issues at all with Lubuntu. I'm running ubuntustudio fine on this Samsung NC10.

vanderZwan 13y ago

"Abiword normally does not have built in facilities for mathematical formulas" The Xerox Alto had this in 1982[1]. NINETEEN FREAKING EIGHTY TWO. How is it possible that any WYSIWYG word processor is allowed to ship without this? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODZBL80JPqw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODZBL80JPqw

girvo 13y ago
Because AbiWords codebase is so painful, adding it is more trouble than it's worth. I tried to port it to elementary with a new UI. Dear god.