On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 01:48:33AM +1100, Wen Lin wrote:
> Great!  I suppose Xubuntu is much lighter than Ubuntu, especially
> when comes to disk usage.

Xubuntu and Ubuntu are the same distribution; the only difference is
the set of packages that are installed by default.  This mostly comes
down to the difference between GNOME and XFCE.  XFCE certainly
requires fewer resources than XFCE.

> This would be essential if want to cram into a 4GB flash disk.

Either ubuntu-desktop or xubuntu-desktop metapackages (and their
dependencies) will fit easily into 4GB.

    # debootstrap hardy x
    # du -sh x
    190M    x
    # chroot x sed -i 's/main/& universe multiverse restricted/' /etc/apt/sources.list
    # chroot x apt-get update
    # echo n | chroot x apt-get install xubuntu-desktop | grep After
    After this operation, 1251MB of additional disk space will be used.
    # echo n | chroot x apt-get install ubuntu-desktop | grep After
    After this operation, 1868MB of additional disk space will be used.

As you can see, the difference is 2.0Gb (Ubuntu) to 1.4Gb (Xubuntu),
saving a little under one third of the space (30%).

> Memory wise, while 512 MB is not too bad for Ubuntu, Xubuntu would
> certainly be able to run much faster and smoother.

This is true.  And if you're prepared to run, say, Emacs instead of
XFCE, you need even less.

My gut feeling is that the process chewing the most RAM on a typical
desktop (unless they're doing Java) is Firefox.  Replacing that would
probably save more memory than replacing GNOME with XFCE.