Installing ubuntu in a 10 year old desktop

February 8, 2017

Specs

age: 10 years 
RAM: 981MB
Hard Drive Size: 80GB
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHZ
width: 64bits

Before Ubuntu

I had installed windows 7 but would stop working after boot if there is no internet connectivity.After connecting to ethernet port it would stuck forever. Sort of *memory LOW * problem.

After Installing Ubuntu

Installing ubuntu was the same like others.But tweaking it to use lowest memory(RAM) possible was my challenge. Without tweaking it would again act like windows 7 and stuck at some point.
Things i did:

My first job was to remove the packages that were using the memory unnescessarily
First of them was the ubuntu default desktop environment.I always hate unity.Don’t know why but i have always hated that.
```
sudo apt remove unity
```
This couldn’t uninstalled unity-greeter package so had to manually uninstall it
```
sudo apt remove unity-greeter
```
I also removed gnome packages.
```
sudo apt remove gnome-*
```
The next thing to do was to remove the ubuntu display manager which is in fact lightdm by default.
```
sudo apt remove lightdm
```
And a quick autoremove of several packages that were no longer needed.
```
sudo apt autoremove
```

All combined

sudo apt remove unity unity-greeter gnome-* lightdm 
sudo apt autoremove

Start installing

Do a quick update
```
sudo apt update
```
Installing the desktop environment first
```
sudo apt install i3
```
As i removed default display manager, i somehow needed to start i3 when X starts, so:
```
cp /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc ~/.xinitrc
emacsclient .xinitrc
```
and add the following line at the end of the file to start i3 when i start my X server manually.
```
exec i3
```

Now install some useful packages

sudo apt install gnome-terminal ranger tmux openssh-server git htop
sudo apt autoremove
reboot

And a clean reboot.In the tty terminal enter your username and password.Then, u will be left in the shell(probably bash shell).Enter:
```
startx
```
This starts the X server.And also the i3 window manager.

Testing the system

setup a xampp server
Start and use firefox
check for information using htop

This that can be done:

Remove network manager and assign static ip.