Ubuntu Karmic to XUbuntu Lucid

[cryptotheslow]

Hi,

I have a feeling I'm probably going to have to figure this one out for myself, but thought I'd ask anyway.

I've been running Ubuntu Karmic for a few months now and have settled on a set of apps that works for me - Thunderbird for mail, Pidgin for IM, XChat for IRC along with a bunch of other odds and sods for other tasks like Bluefish Editor, Filezilla, Skype, PuTTY.

Beyond that - the only requirement I have is for a full-blown driver for my NVidia GTS250 graphics card for the rare moments I find time to shoot some people in Urban Terror. This card is not recognised by the proprietary/restricted drivers in karmic so I use downloads from the NVidia site and have to rebuild each time a kernel update happens. No problems there.

I run with Metacity instead of Compiz and with effects at "None" - maybe I'm a luddite or I fail to grasp the point of eye candy.

I'm keen to get on the lucid LTS release but getting it to play nice is a PITA with this graphics card. And all the "social" apps in the Ubuntu release just leave me cold - I'm not a twitterer, gwibberer, facebooker and the default choices for mail apps are wrong for me.

Should I just do a minimal install to a terminal and build up from there with xfce desktop as a starter or take a fuller install and uninstall the rafts of apps I don't want?

Ta
crypto

[snowpine]

I am a big fan of building up from a "barebones" minimal install: http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/minimal

I do not personally find Xubuntu to be particularly "lightweight" (your mileage may vary).

All that being said, it is a common misconception that removing applications you don't use will speed up your system. The only benefit to removing apps you don't need/want is saving a few mb of hard disk space. Removing the twitter client will not boost your Urban Terror framerate. ;)

[cryptotheslow]

I don't expect that removing apps I don't use will speed up my system... it's just a waste of space installing them to begin with.

I thought about xubuntu because with karmic I chose to have no effects on the desktop.

As long as I can get the GPU drivers working in lucid I'll be happy to build up from barebones and add the apps I need. Until then I'm stuck with karmic.

[snowpine]

I don't know much about nvidia drivers, unfortunately. Psychocat's tutorials are usually pretty good, have you tried this method? http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/nvidia

I recommend extensive testing of a 10.04 Live CD before committing to an upgrade. :)