Which LIGHT Linux distro for the 512MB AA1?

Yep... due to marred and overtightened screws, I cannot upgrade the RAM in my AA1.
I tried Kuki which works very well, but it's still a little to resource intensive. I want something that'll run Skype, Firefox etc, but with very little lag... So a very light OS.
I may eventually get back to the original OS but it's a bit of a hassle and I like experimenting with Linux distros.

So which is a very light OS for the AA1, 8GB SSD, which would offer me a little familiarity from Ubuntu and which would allow me to use Pidgin, Skype and Firefox? I don't use my AA1 for much else than browsing so added functions aren't that important.

Thanks!

 

Not sure, but probably Slitaz. It is very, very, light weight, yet still very user friendly.

 

Puppy Linux is another lightweight possibility. It uses seamonkey by default rather than firefox, so if that's important, you'll want to grab the firefox pet package (pet packages are small packages for Puppy)

 

I am very enthousiastic about xpud. It starts very fast from an USB stick. less then 20 sec. And very compatible with extra applications, like skype etc. It works right out of the bos. Even wireless is no problem. The ONLY problem with this distribution is the installation on the SSD. You can install the image (64 MB!) on the harddisk, but the problem is that it is difficult to boot from that image, because the described boot configuration is not compatible with grub from f.i. Linux Ubuntu! Or you install it from a windows program. But then you have to install Windows on your AspireOne. (?!)

 

I have a AA1 8Gb myself and installed Fedora 10, later 11 and now 12 XFCE spin. there is a great how2 for getting Fedora at its best at http://jorge.fbarr.net/2009/06/11/fedor ... spire-one/ -- you'll have to look for the F12 story but its about the same.

the AA1 boots in about 20 secs depending how many services you want to start up. everything works, even plug-and-pray beemers with xp.ppt presentations (I use my AA1 to demonstrate the super usability of Linux in a corporate M$ environment ;-)

XFCE spins you can get thru the Fedora site at http://fedoraproject.org/index.html. until now they all could be booted from LiveUSB.

Meine

 

My current favorite is a modified Fedora LXDE spin (F13 branch). I swapped in gimp, gthumb, roxterm, geany, mplayer (along with the gnome-mplayer front-end) and firefox, for mtpaint, gpicview, lxterminal, leafpad, lxmusic/xmms2 and midori, and added java (openjdk), gramps, glade3, devhelp. I also deleted all the unneeded xorg driver files, but kept all the font files (not sure why; it just seemed like the right thing to do). Total disk space used is about 2.1GB. It seems faster to me than either GNOME or XFCE.

 

If you want really fast and ultra light then it has to be DSL (Darn Small Linux) as is is written in assembler rather than compiled from C code. It will boot from a pen drive and takes about 58Mb, or 120Mb with a full set of applications. I've had it running on an elderly Thinkpad P75 and 16Mb ram.

 

First, be warned: DSL apparently does not work with the AA1 Atheros wireless, though you might be able to use ndiswrapper--DSL uses a 2.4.x kernel, not 2.6.x. Also, DSL is still largely C, since it's Linux...But it is much faster.

TinyCore Linux worked alright for me, 13 second boot from Grub on my AA1 with ~70MB of packages--note that it normally installs to ram each boot (similar to DSL), so a fresh install would be roughly 10 seconds. I used Madwifi, with some tinkering (edited dependency lists) to get it loaded before the normal driver. Wifi-radar is good for networking.

If you have Kuki Linux, just replace XFCE with a lighter environment (IceWM is my choice; LXDE is worth using, though a wee bit heavier than IceWM; Openbox by itself is the lightest you can get, but needs tweaking).
In other words, "apt-get install icewm pcmanfm"

Latest Puppy Linux is decent, though wireless is flaky (half hour up).

Nimblex (before 2010RC) is fast, but 2007v2 is too old--no wireless, screen is 800x600.

I won't recommend trying the AntiX 8.5 RC--I did, it took the "ifconfig wlan0 up; iwconfig wlan0 mode Managed essid <essid> ...;dhclient wlan0" method of networking, and when I installed, it failed to boot. In fact, Kuki Linux failed to boot afterwards until I worked on it some.

Scientific Linux 5.4 is tolerable (weak wireless, old kernel, 800x600; fast when using the mini livecd to install) but it's RPM-based, with yum instead of apt -- apt is available, though.

 

I know this post is about LIGHT Distros, but this may be of interest. I got into trouble with Linpus (mix of xfce and xfce4 modules) so decided to replace linpus. After trying Puppy and Mint I found both had difficulty loading the applications I use regularly so I did a net install of openSUSE. It took nearly an hour on an (allegedly) 8Mb broadband connection, but it was well worth it; openSUSE 11.2 now offers FXCE and LXDE desktops in addition to KDE and Gnome.
Bulletproof, everything works, auto-upgrade available as components get up-versioned and I can swap application config files with my desktop machines.

 

Somy many great options, so little space on the SSD...

 

Hi

Mint Linux with the Fluxbox works great on my 512mb aa1.

http://netbook-experience.com/2010/03/how-to-install-mint-linux-8-fluxbox-on-the-acer-aspire-one/

Cheers
John M

 

lol, yes all of a sudden it appears that there's a hell of a lot of decent options.
People in the ubuntu forum are rating that lubuntu too.

I need to swap mine soon, i'm still using desktop ubuntu 9.04, jaunty.
I kind of like it, certainly more than linpus and i'm no linux techie. The thing what drives me nuts is when i've got a few tabs open, or the update manager comes up, the screen goes grey as it's too much for my netbook, even after i installed an extra gig of ram.

I think i'm going to give the linux mint helana fluxbox a go, or fedora lxde spin, just for a change from ubuntu.
I hope theres no messing around to get the simple stuff working though.

 

Not light but Suse has the most flexibility, and the package updater is polite, puts an orange star on the toolbar and waits until you action it - and put it in background to do its work. You don't have to make desktop choices, just install KDE, Gnome, XFCE and LXDE - then choose which one you want at logon, either implicitly to use the same as the last session, of actively select a different one.

 

Not sure how Suse is any more flexible than Fedora, Ubuntu, Mandriva, etc... Any distro that uses GDM, KDM, LXDM, or even XDM as graphical login manager will give you a choice of desktop sessions. I know for sure that Ubuntu and Fedora would give me a notification icon in the panel when updates await if I hadn't deleted all update notifiers. Not saying Suse is bad, but what you're describing isn't just a Suse thing. Now, had you been extolling the virtues of Yast (if it has any; haven't used it in a long time), that would be a unique to Suse. Also, installing full-blown GNOME, KDE, XFCE, and LXDE might be less than desirable on a system with only an 8MB SSD. Don't get me wrong, Suse runs just fine on the AA1; If you try it and find that you like it, by all means, go for it.

 

Yes. YAST has moved on in 11.2. For a netbook installation software searching by text string has been moved out of the traditional window into a new one. The new search window is not restricted to the configured repositories and invites you to add new repositories for any software you select from search results.
I was not suggesting that you keep all desktops, but the ease of add/remove in a very few keystrokes means it is easy to try and discard. The installation tool is certainly the best I have seen, but I have not used Fedora for a long time -not since Red Hat and RS6000-320s with a 10Gb scsii disk pack.
There is also an element of using what you are familiar with in my choice, same as why there are still Windows users out there.

 

Kinda surprised nobody's suggested the lighter ubuntu-based Crunchbang, which uses Openbox as its main WM. The debian-based alphas are reportedly lighter, but I don't quite trust alphas.

I had nice luck running it on a 1.7ghz P4 (256kb L2), 512MB of RAM (PC133 SDRAM), and a 16MB Rage 128 Pro - Things felt fairly responsive (especially for a LiveCD) and Youtube video was just as smooth as on my desktop PC with a 1GB GeForce 9500GT (or fairly close - I'm not the most perceptive with dropped frames on flash video, I'll admit). I'd guess the Rage card is a bit below the GMA950, too, but I don't quite know.

Give it a shot, run it off a USB disk first. You might be impressed, and if not, there are plenty of other suggestions that were listed here. Tiny Core has been tempting, but I don't trust myself enough to build up my own system that would function well while I was out and unable to troubleshoot with another machine.

 

I installed the newly released Openbox version of PCLinuxOS a few days ago. It's not as light as Puppy or DSL, but it works great. Boots in about 30 seconds without any tweaking. I could probably knock a few more seconds off of that if I wanted. Everything I can think of works out of the box: wireless, SD card reader, multimedia. PCLOS also has easy-to-use config tools. The only manual config I did was to move the panel from the top to bottom, but that was so simple it's not worth even talking about.

Before PCLOS, I tried Fedora 13 Beta (regular Gnome version). I like Fedora, but it's really too bloated for a netbook.

 

Fedora soon-to-be-13 under LXDE with most of the GNOME items stripped out weighs in at 2.5GB on my AA1. Fedora Rawhide (LXDE) with OpenOffice.org looks to be about 3.1GB. With 1GB RAM, I had no problems running GNOME; it just pulls in a bunch of crap for which I have no use.

 

I've been running Jolicloud in my Acer Aspire One Netbook 512 meg ram, 8 gig SSD for a few months now. I'm very happy with the speed, the stability (considering it's a pre-final release), the support for "cloud computing", wireless stability and ease of installation.
After trying a few other netbook distros I really feel like this is "The One".

 

My A110 8GB + 512MB is currently running Ubuntu 10.04 NBR quite happily but I must admit it's not blazingly quick. Perfectly acceptable though. I've recently tried Peppermint OS on my laptop though and am very tempted to give it a go on the AA1. It's based off Lubuntu with some bits of LinuxMint. The desktop is VERY light and quick (being LXDE based) but it also has things like built-in flash and DVD playback inherited from Mint (great if just running as a LiveCD). You don't get many apps installed by default to keep the installation small but you do get links to 'cloud' variants like Google Docs which run in the prism cut-down browser. Apparently it runs perfectly happily in 256MB so 512 is overkill