stream303 said: Another option to consider for the easy route, is to install from the XFCE installation image, even if you don't plan to use a desktop environment, and use a window manager instead of XFCE for the most part.
Then, after the installation, grab your favorite window manager. There are many. My favorite is IceWM. Don't spend much time in XFCE, just get to a terminal and download icewm:
apt-get install icewm
Now logout. When you get to the GDM login screen, go to the SESSION menu, and tell it to make IceWM the default for logins from now on.
Bingo - a very slim window manager environment. The nice thing is that you can use XFCE's "mousepad" for a simple gui text editor by calling it up from an xterm:
mousepad &
You could even start using XFCE's own lighweight gui terminal, but at some point you may just ask yourself if you should run XFCE in the first place? :)
At any rate, this is an alternate way of bringing up a minimal system for exploration, although you lose the learning experience of installing *everything* step by step.
And, if you want to reclaim some disk space, just use apt-get to start deleting obvious things like OpenOffice, Gimp, (or I guess use synaptic if you want to pull that up for package management) and replace them with say Abiword and ImageMagick for instance. That kind of thing...
It could be a great way to get a very low-memory system up and running for someone who isn't into all the low-level details, but still wants to run and eventually learn from a very basic environment.
Yeh- I don't like removing stuff, I like adding the only things I need. So, low level stuff is the life for me. (I like to disable xinit from starting so I can trip a MS user out when I have him start up the comp (or w.e).
I need to find out how to use my printer on Debian. It's working on Ubuntu, but Debian doesn't have the printer drivers in Foomatic.
I found that to extremely frustrating. I love the minimalist environment even a full installation gives me (so,so)- but a printer not working, just blows me away.
I liked the expert install from the xfce lenny- thanks.