The DistRogue

Sunday, October 14, 2007

Ubustu repo merge: You don't care now, but...

One of the less-touted changes for Ubuntu 7.10 is the merge of the Ubuntu Studio repositories into the main ones (hosted by Canonical). This means you'll be able to install entire categories of multimedia software (audio, video, graphics) with a single command (or via Synaptic, as usual). You don't care, right?
Okay, let me put it another way.
A while back, I stacked up Ubuntu Studio versus dyne:bolic, a rival multimedia distribution. My biggest complaint was that dyne:bolic could run on as little as 64MB of RAM and a Pentium (i586) with satisfactory results, while Ubustu couldn't come close because it used GNOME. Well, say hello to Fluxbuntu, the latest addition to Ubuntu's growing armada of forks. It uses Fluxbox as its desktop environment, and in addition, according to Wikipedia:
As well as using the Fluxbox window manager, Fluxbuntu has removed many packages and daemons from Ubuntu which makes it even more lightweight.
This remedies one of the reasons why Ubuntu is so slow: it runs a lot of unnecessary software in the background, making it bloated. The opposite is the reason other distros, such as dyne:bolic, leave it in the dust at the benchmarks.
What does this have to do with the repository merge? It means that Ubustu can now run on pretty much any base system. If you like KDE more than Ubustu's default GNOME, you can install Ubustu packages over Kubuntu (but please read my previous post first... 0.o) But more to the point, you can now run a complete Ubustu studio over a lighter-weight base by installing Fluxbuntu and adding the Ubustu packages manually. And it's not that hard. Just use these commands:
sudo apt-get install ubuntustudio-audio
sudo apt-get install ubuntustudio-video
sudo apt-get install ubuntustudio-graphics

Or just install those packages via Synaptic.
From Ubuntu 7.10,
The DistRogue.

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