Ubuntu uninstall problems

I decided to remove some redundant software from my Ubuntu Maverick Meercat (vers 10.10) install and try and improve its performance as it only has a 1.6 GHz processor.

Being an old install the software repository is no longer supported and I had to set up a legacy one by searching Google. I updated the repository files and it was working fine.

Uninstalling begins...

Next I uninstalled the supplied Office software and next was GIMP. Ubuntu selected a huge amount of files and it wasn't until after I clicked OK that I noticed that 1GB was going to be removed. Not only was GIMP removed but also the Linux kernel!

The system was still running (from memory no doubt). I backed up the /var, /etc and the /home folders. The kernel seemed to install OK from the repositories, but on reboot the system failed to run.

I suspect that the older repository confused the Synaptic Package Manager and when GIMP was uninstalled this was linked to the kernel somehow.

Ubuntu Server

I didn't want to go back to Maverick Meerkat but the later versions of Ubuntu desktop are too demanding for my older computer.

Using VM Virtual Box I tried out a few low resource Linux versions. After having a read of a good article about them I tried :

• Damn Small Linux
• Lubuntu
• Puppy Linux
• Slitaz

Damn Small and Puppy Linux lacked Apache and you would have to install it later.

Slitaz was difficult to get up and running. The furthest I got was to get the install menu from the CD image. The instructions on the site are hard to follow and I couldn't make sense of it. I gave up and went onto the next distro.

Lubuntu was the best one I think. Easy to set up and use. I had a few issues setting up other software getting errors when the system couldn't find things. I didn't want any hassles at all; and the Linux desktop got very little use.

All I need is a server running Apache, PHP, MySQL and Backuppc. Ubuntu server turned out to be very easy to install. Once done it can be managed from a terminal and with Webmin from a very nice web interface.

With no GUI using up resources it serves up data quickly.

The best solution was to install Ubuntu Server; the Linux desktop had not been used. And with the /var and /home folders still intact my Linux box was almost better than it was. Except for backuppc, but that's another story.