May 15, 2009

Setting Up A Minimal Ubuntu Desktop

Once again my old security professor from college comes at me with some very useful information. This time in the form of an awesome Linux tip. He forwarded me a link to a post from Lifehacker who themselves mentioned a post in the Ubuntu Forums from a guy calling himself TheShiv.

TheShiv talked about how with the default Ubuntu installation there were a lot of pre-installed applications that he did not use that took up a lot of resources, and ultimately slowed the computer down more than it needed to. Fed up with that he wrote a quick script to use after doing an install using Ubuntu Server edition or the Minimal CD. With both of those, Ubuntu installs with just the terminal.

After your install you can wget TheShiv's script which I made available here: (Mini.sh)

For example, after your install from the terminal do the following:



sudo apt-get update
wget http://ftp.bauer-power.net/misc/Ubuntu_Minimal/Mini.sh
chmod +x Mini.sh
sudo ./Mini.sh


Now sit back, grab some coffee and wait for your Minimal Ubuntu install to be pulled down from the repositories to settle nicely on your hard drive!

After installing all the minimal packages, now you can pull down only what you need as far as applications, and you don't have any extras your don't. Doing this type of install saved TheShiv approximately 260MB of typical memory usage. I think I will be doing this for all future releases of Bauer-Puntu ;-)

What kind of things do you do to optimize your Ubuntu (Or other distro) installation? Do you have special scripts of your own? Let us know in the comments!

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