There's a lot of interest in the Linux world in minimal installations. There are a number of distributions aimed specifically at this need, from aggressive ones like Tiny Core Linux to those that simply don't install many packages by default like BunsenLabs or the one such major Ubuntu derivative I know of, Bodhi Linux (I'm not counting the Ubuntu Mini Remix because it's intended as a base for further development and, among other things, has no installer of its own).
Here I'm carefully using the term "minimal" as distinct from "lightweight." Lubuntu doesn't need a lot of RAM or a fast processor (so I believe it's correct to call it "lightweight"), but it does install a lot of stuff (so it's not "minimal").
A purer approach than using BunsenLabs or Bodhi is to take one of the cornerstone distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, or Arch, install the base system, and go from there. I recently did this with Ubuntu and felt like I was going well outside of what was well-supported by the tools. So I came here to give the feedback that I wish this was a more supported operation. As I said above, my perception is that there's a lot of interest in minimal installs. As for the struggles I had installing, the piece that generalizes is this: the wireless support is limited. The mini ISO only has limited wireless modules, and what's more doesn't support UEFI, but fair enough, it's a mini ISO. So I switched to the server ISO. I was surprised to find that the server ISO also didn't support my wireless card, so I had to sneak the relevant modules in. This is a real ninja process, starting with just figuring out what the modules are in the first place and where to get them. If there hadn't been a question on askubuntu that was similar enough to show up in a search, I would have been dead meat. I guess the assumption is that if you're setting up a server, you might have wired internet. But if server installs are the de facto way to do minimal installs, and if more and more computers are being sold without ethernet jacks, that's no longer a safe assumption. So in conclusion I think it would be great if future versions of Ubuntu made it easier for those of us who would struggle to add modules to our install media to pull of minimal installs, whether using the server ISOs or otherwise.
Bookmarks