I have an older windows laptop onto which I'm installing ubuntu within a VM. My goal is just to use terminal-based linux tools such as vim and shell scripting. I don't give a hoot about any gui for this box.
So I first installed ubuntu minimalcd and chose "Basic Ubuntu Server". Upon boot, the text-based terminal came up and I logged in, but the problem is it only gives me 80 columns. I want to do terminal mode vim but have a couple hundred columns to take advantage of my large monitor. If you happen to know how to do that, please see my question here .
This post is assuming that the other question is not answerable, and that I will need a desktop to get more than 80 columns in a terminal window. So if that is the case, I want the lightest weight one possible, because this is older hardware and all I want is the ability to have nice big text-based terminal windows for editing text. From the ubuntu minimal CD, I see options for Edubuntu, Kubuntu, etc. Which one of the available desktops would be a good choice for my needs?
Press F4, and you will be able to choose minimal system installation mode.
Going further, you will eventually be asked if you want to install more packages on top of the minimal system. If you want a pure command-line system, skip the step without choosing anything. Or you can select the last "Manual package selection" option to preemptively select any packages you were planning to install to build your custom environment.
Upon choosing manual package selection, you will be greeted by a standard interactive instance of
Best Answer
Edubuntu is just Ubuntu really, and Kubuntu runs the KDE environment, all of those are not lightweight.
If you are going for a desktop then you might be more interested in something like lubuntu or Xubuntu. Out of those I would think that Xubuntu is the lightest, although I'm not totally sure on that. Either way, both of those are extremely light-weight and designed for older hardware