Recently I've been installing Ubuntu 10.04 on an old laptop with just about 160MB RAM (and a 300MHz Celeron CPU)...
After some tweaking the system runs quite nice with LXDE (cache) as desktop environment, and Opera works good as a web browser (as long as I don't access any extremely JavaScript-heavy sites). Just having to use NetworkManager with all it's GNOME dependencies for easy wireless setup was somewhat of a pain.
A post on the LXDE forums mentioned wicd (cache) as an alternative. The version included with Ubuntu just works, although the dialogs are somewhat clunky on an 800x600 display. But then there's also a cli and a curses version of the frontend. Doesn't seem as if I'm going to look back to NetworkManager...
Things I did to save some memory (besides removing anything GNOME-ish):
After some tweaking the system runs quite nice with LXDE (cache) as desktop environment, and Opera works good as a web browser (as long as I don't access any extremely JavaScript-heavy sites). Just having to use NetworkManager with all it's GNOME dependencies for easy wireless setup was somewhat of a pain.
A post on the LXDE forums mentioned wicd (cache) as an alternative. The version included with Ubuntu just works, although the dialogs are somewhat clunky on an 800x600 display. But then there's also a cli and a curses version of the frontend. Doesn't seem as if I'm going to look back to NetworkManager...
Things I did to save some memory (besides removing anything GNOME-ish):
- remove all the Landscape tools
- remove AppArmor
- use mrxvt instead of the LXDE Terminal (yeah I know, dropping LXDE completely would help a lot more)
- purge ureadahead (cache) because of (probably) bug 543230 (cache).
- blacklist all filesystem modules I don't use so the kernel doesn't load them
- some more stuff I'll add as soon as I remember what it was