Xubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid)

Xubuntu 8.10 is Ubuntu 8.10 with Xfce as the graphical desktop. Even though LXDE is lighter, there are reasons to use Xfce as a desktop manager. Each graphical desktop manager comes with a set of packages for the common, and not so common tasks.  Each graphical desktop manaager comes with its own menu structure for accessing packages. When choosing your default graphical desktop manager, you need to consider the entire package with lightness being one of the factors.

While Xfce is not as light as LXDE, Xfce has some advantages:

• It is a compositing desktop, which allows for more visual effects. It also allows a partially hidden screen to change.
• Xfce still keeps it simple.
• The applications provided in the desktop environment are mature and stable, and there are a lot of them.
• It component oriented design allows you to create a custom desktop that meets your needs.

Xubuntu is part of the Ubuntu family of distributions. The reason I like Xubuntu are:

• The install was fast and easy.
• The Wifi card was detected and started without any intervention. In advance, I knew that the card was supported by Linux, and did not require ndiswrapper to make it work.
• Beside the standard application, the Ubuntu repository has a good collection of amateur radio applications.

The one downside is that the amount available free memory is rather small when the machine only has 256 megabytes of memory. While there is plenty of memory available through releasing memory held by buffers and caches, this will ultimately impact on performance. Yet, for those who do not want to fiddle with changing to LXDE as a desktop, Xubuntu is still a good alternative for machines with at least   256 megabytes of memory.

Since Xfce does not have a login manager, Xubuntu use GDM for a login manager. The window manager is xfwm4, which is the default window manager for Xfce. Just changing the login manager to SLiM would save 5 megabytes of memory. The slim is available from the Ubuntu repository.