Ubuntu – Lubuntu vs. Xubuntu for development

Your case studies are indeed challenging.

Take your Grandpa PC

Pentium 2 and 64Mb RAM.

Lubuntu minimum requirements are 128Mb if using the alternate installer - 256Mb for the Graphical installer.

The recommended RAM is 384Mb just to run the LiveCD.

Therefore - I'm afraid, you will not be able to install a graphical environment on Grandpa PC. At best you might get a text only "server" type install via a minimal ISO - i.e. you need a minimum of 64Mb to run the minimal CD.

The "old meat":

That is more promising:

Pentium 3 with 128Mb RAM - you should be able to squeeze on Lubuntu via its alternate CD.

However the minimum requirement for Xubuntu is 256Mb with 512Mb as a recommended RAM size.

I've experimented with various "low" RAM installs. I've never tried 128Mb - but in general, I install from a minimal ISO CD and install various components manually - for example, SLIM, LXDE with apt-get install --no-install-recommends to ensure no excess packages are installed.

Typical packages you should look out for if you go this route are described in the linked question below.

Stick with a lightweight browser such as midori - abiword should be ok for wordprocessing.

Flash and general movies will struggle with your video card. However playing music should be fine (see below)

Links:

1. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD
2. How do I install LXDE / Lubuntu?
3. Lightweight music player

Eventually my son got Lubuntu going, though there can be no guarantee that his solution will be effective on any other make of Laptop. He added a file:

/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/70-vesa.conf

with contents as follows

 Section "Device"
 Identifier "Configured Video Device"
 Driver "vesa"
 EndSection

 Section "Monitor"
 Identifier "Configured Monitor"
 VendorName "Monitor Vendor"
 ModelName "Monitor Model"
 HorizSync 30.0 - 53.0
 VertRefresh 50.0 - 60.0

 EndSection

 #Section
 "Module"

 #Load
 "vesa” 

 #EndSection


 Section "Screen"
 Identifier "Default Screen"
 Monitor "Configured Monitor"
 Device "Configured Video Device"
    Subsection "Display"
    Modes "1024x768"
    EndSubsection
 EndSection

He commented further: The command sudo lshw (list hardware - as a mnemonic) will show you what the hardware itself claims to be - this is how we saw you acer laptop actually has the ye-olde unichrome S3 display built into the motherboard. I would be interested to see if windows claims to have the same display adapter. My reading suggests it should work with the 'openchrome' adapter, but our experience was clearly that it does not work. The motherboard is relevant. I think we might have eventually got somewhere by forcing the openchrome adapter and simultaneously forcing the screen configuration, but the setup of /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d was such that it was determining the number of screens and display adapters at boot time. Incidentially the file /home/”username”/.config/Xorg.config.new was written, even though running Xorg -configure didn't work. There were some clues in here - but it was wanting to set up three graphics drivers and associate them with the one screen. I think that was fundamentally the complaint lightdm was having with the xorg configuration, but I cannot be completely certain. Forcing a single display adapter that was openchrome without forcing the resolution didn't work so I fell back to 'vesa' rendering - this is more basic and doesn't fully exploit the graphical processing capability, but at least works.