You can't get Gutsy with only 602 MB of free disk space

I figured I would try to upgrade my Xubuntu 7.04 Feisty setup on the converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client to Gutsy 7.10.

It's no secret that Xubuntu has, in its short life (6.06 was its first release, I believe) never been as polished -- nor has it received as much polishing attention -- as the flagship Ubuntu. But for older hardware, Xubuntu can mean the difference between a good 'Buntu experience and the other kind. And in this case, the VIA 1 GHz motherboard on the thin client doesn't perform nearly as well as the 1.3 GHz Celeron Gateway laptop on which I'm testing Ubuntu 7.10.

But for maximum flexibility, the converted thin client's Xubuntu install also has the Ubuntu desktop, switchable upon login. All in 4.6 GB. Right now I have 608 MB left in the partition. On this particular 14 GB hard drive I am triple-booting Xubuntu/Ubuntu 7.04 along with Slackware 12 and the frugal install of Puppy 2.17.

Since 7.04, I've been having problems with the upper and lower XFCE panels not appearing, either on the live CD or after an install on this thin client. My solution, thus far, has been to install Xubuntu with the 6.10 live CD, then upgrading to 7.04, and in theory to go then to 7.10. For one thing, the ability to easily upgrade an existing install to a new version without a full reinstall is one of Ubuntu's great strengths (and one of many it inherited from Debian). Just about the only way to commit to long-term use of something like ZenWalk, Vector or the many other Linux distros that seem to be releasing a new, non-upgradeable version of their system every three months or so, is to have /home on a separate partition and to methodically clean out all the config files before every reinstall. (Note: I can't vouch for the upgradability of ZenWalk and Vector; but I once killed a Zenwalk 4.4 install by trying to upgrade it through the package manager after 4.6 came put).

Why clean out the config files? I tried for a time to dual-boot Debian Etch and Ubuntu with a shared /home partition, and I ended up with a broken Feisty when the two distros began depositing conflicting configuration information in /home.

On a single-boot system (or on one with only one Linux distro, at any rate), you can probably keep a separate /home partition and not have the same problems, but again, I wouldn't commit to using something like ZenWalk -- a distro I really like, by the way -- as my long-term OS with the same confidence as Ubuntu/Xubuntu because of the latter's ability to upgrade to a new release without a full reinstall. It doesn't help that all versions of ZenWalk since 4.4 install fine but then won't boot on my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop.

At this point, the $0 Laptop has a mostly empty partition to which I'm going to backup the /home files of its current distros (Debian, Ubuntu) before I change the distros I'm running on it. But no more dual-booting with a single /home partition. I've learned my lesson there, big time.

Anyway, back to the Xubuntu 7.10 upgrade. As I said, I only have 608 MB left on the Xubuntu/Ubuntu 7.04 partition on this particular drive (the thin client can be easily switched between three identical hard disks that attach by extra-long cables going inside the box).

And before I get any further, let me say that this box has responded very well to Xubuntu 7.04. It looks better than any other Xfce desktop I've seen. It's not as fast as Slackware, Vector, ZenWalk or Debian, but it looks great, performs acceptably well and, due to its Debian underpinnings -- is extremely easy to manage in terms of adding software and doing upgrades. Did I mention that it looks great? Whoever did the Xfce implementation in Xubuntu 7.04 really did it well.

I downloaded the 7.10 live CD ISO and burned it. At first boot, I had the familiar problem with the floppy drive not being properly recognized. Hint: I don't have a floppy drive. Eventually Xubuntu 7.10 boots. As in Tribe 5 of this release, the resolution is kind of screwed up. It's 1440 x something I can't remember.

Now this thin client does support 1280 x 1024, but looks a whole lot better with the attached 15-inch CRT monitor at 1024 x 768. I managed to get the proper resolution (and with it bigger icons and windows that just plain look better).

Another thing about Xubuntu 7.10: The desktop colors are a bit duller than in 7.04. It looks like many other implementations of Xfce, and doesn't stand out from the pack.

Also: I was still unable to save and switch between multiple network configurations, like I can in Ubuntu 7.10. Whatever bug prevented me from doing that in 7.04 has persisted in 7.10.

I used the Update Manager to do the upgrade. Once I started the install, the files downloaded, but as the process continued, the installer told me there wasn't enough disk space to continue. I can't argue with 602 MB not being enough, and I'm very happy that the installer proceeded to delete the new files and leave my 7.04 setup untouched. I've had way worse happen (like when I didn't have enough space in a partition to install FreeBSD and the whole thing crashed halfway through).

So to sum up, I didn't install Xubuntu 7.10. On the VIA thin client, I'll stick with my Xubuntu/Ubuntu 7.04 setup (I'm not ready to delete the Slackware 12 and Puppy 2.17 partitions at this point).

Now that I'm happily running Ubuntu 7.10 on my Gateway laptop, I see how the thin client underperforms in comparison. All the multimedia issues I have with the VIA box (the motherboard is an EVEm model by ECS) are thankfully not a problem with the Gateway laptop, and I can watch videos as well in Ubuntu as I can in Puppy (or Windows, for that matter, which for all its faults seems to do Flash video very well).

I don't know how popular Xubuntu is in relation to the standard Ubuntu distro, but I hope Canonical and the developers who work on the Xfce version of the desktop continue to develop it for Ubuntu and start hitting those bugs harder. The best part of the experience was ending up with a fully functional 7.04 system after the upgrade failed. You can't ask for more than that -- and you often get much less.