A Quick Look at Lubuntu 10.04

Talk about spartan, Lubuntu keeps the desktop totally clean. Does minimal mean more memory? How far does Lubuntu take the minimalist approach?

The only surprise during the install was that I was never prompted as to where to locate the boot record. It was no surprise that Lubuntu uses GRUB2, and that GRUB2 correctly recognized CentOS and PCLinuxOS, both of which use Legacy GRUB. I used the parted command to check the boot flags. Sure enough, the boot flag is still set for PCLinuxOS, which means the install script placed GRUB2 on the MBR.

Before installing the updates, I did a memory check after the initial boot and had 250,076 KiB of free memory. I installed the updates, which included a kernel upgrade. After booting with the new kernel, the free command reported a drop to 231,876 KiB of memory. Adding in available memory from buffers and caches, the total came to 376,458 KiB. PCLinuxOS LXDE still holds the record for the most amount of free memory, and its desktop was anything but spartan.

Lubuntu defaults to Chromium as the Web browser. Instead of the usual home page for the distro, the default home page was google.com.  To see what it could do with flash movies, I went to hulu.com. After being able to view movies using Chromium on PCLinuxOS, I was not ready for the message that I needed to upgrade to Adobe Flash 10.0.22. When I clicked the download button, I got a message that I was running the latest version of flash. When I tried to watch movies from Google’s Video link, it said I was missing the necessary plugin.

The default image viewer is gpicview. The strange part is that gpicview (“Image Viewer” is the menu name) does not appear under the Graphics submenu. Rather, it appears under Accessories. I am not sure of the logic behind this decision.

GNOME MPlayer is the default video player, which does appear in the submenu for Sound & Video. I check it with .flv, .mp4, and .wmv movies. The Mplayer played all formats without a problem, including flash videos. So why can’t Chromium play flash movies?

Since there tends to be a problem with the creation of menu entries during package installation, I installed Eye of Gnome and Gwenview (a KDE4 package). For the first time, Eye of Gnome did not appear in any of the menus. However, Gwenview did appear under the Graphics menu. Even better, Gwenview worked without a single hitch. If I started Eye of Gnome from the command-line it worked, but generated a lot of GLib errors. It just not have a menu entry. One of the advantages of starting an application from the command-line is that error message appear that otherwise would be lost in the bit bucket.

For me, the three surprises were the automatic installation of GRUB2 to the MBR, the failure to run Flash Videos in Chromium, and the failure of Eye of Gnome to appear in the menu structure.  While LXDE definitely optimizes memory, it is not for the beginning user who would not be able to resolve these kind of issues. My final opinion is the Lubuntu is a minimal starting point for building a personal desktop environment. Occasionally, you will need to roll up your sleeves and dive into the configuration files to figure out what went wrong.