I am working on a full rebuild of my Ubuntu Linux server (16.04.2 LTS) which I use for a media
server. My previous server, I followed this guide to install a lightweight Gnome desktop to use in various occasions where a desktop environment was handy to have:
The desktop would not start automatically when the system was rebooted. For the new server, I am interested in doing the same, but with a Mate desktop instead. I am interested if there would be a minimal Mate desktop install, as well as not have it automatically load at boot. When using Gnome, I would just launch the desktop by typing in “startx”. The procedure in the link above walked you through disabling some services so that Gnome would not start at startup. I am interested if the same procedure would apply for the Mate desktop
Finding the code that starts the desktop is probably going to lead straight to systemd, which i think stuffs all its parameterizing into a single directory, or something, anyway no matter how much i gripe about systemd they did write some doc for it. Google is your friend… and i’m not saying that as a rebuke, i’m saying that this stuff is so spread out that you need some kind of map to find most anything. And a couple clues about what to look for, which not always obvious.
So knowing that Ubuntu-MATE runs systemd, all you have to do is grep around a little bit for whatever naming convention they used, which they should at least have hinted at in the doc. So let’s see what i can find with “linux systemd lightdm” (because lightdm is the desktop manager in use).
Ubuntu-MATE is ubuntu-derived and ubuntu is debian-derived so jessie (i think it’s still in LTS) is like the upstream of um-16.04, or maybe i have my numbers crossed.
Ah, here is some connecting information, systemd does everything in “units” apparently,
That oughta keep you busy for a while, i remember when i first started using linux, i kept getting told to search with google but it took me a while to figure out what to search for, since the youngsters had been busy making up new terms while i was off doing work with the old ones, LOL.
I have a little experience with the well-kept secret Ubuntu mini.iso. This installs via network and has many “minimal” options including MATE desktop.
Long story short, minimal seems to be only the ubuntu-mate-core package. The ubuntu-mate-desktop package adds the heavier stuff.
All the Ubuntu desktops and server are available on this 58M ISO but you need a hardwired network. What’s nice is you start up to date on everything.
So no ability at this point to just perform a sudo apt-get install command to install a minimal install of Mate? (no need for LibreOffice, ThunderBird, Rhythmbox, etc). The ability to install things like Ubuntu Tweak and gparted is all I really need.
First, be aware major under-the-hood changes has replaced sysv with systemd. This means sysv-rc.conf and startx no longer exist. This is what @crankypuss is getting at.
Is there a 1-to-1 command translation? From what I see, not even close. htpcbeginner hasn’t updated but there may be no simple solution.
The minimal MATE install package is named ubuntu-mate-core. I see it includes Firefox but nothing else heavy like a Libre Office.
Personally, I run Ubuntu Server 16.04 with no desktop at all. But I run remote via ssh -X to run GUI apps on the server like synaptic and gparted from my main MATE desktop. This may or may not fit your needs as some things simply won’t work.
@torbuk from a terminal you can run apt-cache showpkg ubuntu-mate-core to see what ubuntu-mate-core consist of. My virtual ubuntu-mini reports it would add 1223 new files, download 691 MB of archives, and 2,445 MB of space taken after install. Although as @Bill_MI stated, Firefox is the only heavy hitter in the list of dependencies.
Thankyou thankyou thankyou! Your link to the mini iso has shown me from “Index of /ubuntu/dists/xenial/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot” just how the builds are organized, or am i mistaken?
I’ve never figured out exactly what this is but I do notice, thanks to your expanding the path, I pointed to the i386 and not the amd64 version.
Perhaps someone can explain this tree of files. I got here from a very obscure link long ago.
EDIT: Gee, I know what this is. It’s one of several mirrored repositories. Here’s another from my /etc/apt/sources.list. But why hide mini.iso here?
I too desired a very minimal MATE desktop using as few space and apps as possible -- it didn't need to be pretty -- this was for a virtual machine purely for building i386 builds of Wine. It was based off either the mini or Ubuntu Server 16.04 ISO.
The main being -- use mate-desktop as the metapackage (for just a mate-desktop environment) and pass --no-install-recommends to only install the bare minimal needed.
Just want to point out TinyCore Linux as a viable server solution. Barring that. you can at least take its desktop once you figure out what software it is using for most of it.
From a cursory search on Wikipedia the system uses BusyBox and FLTK.
Hi team,
Long time bump, but was wondering what would be the best approach if I wanted to do a very light weight linux VM (on TrueNas OS); where I can use a GUI.
Trying to find mate core server etc. no luck. Just use Ubuntu server or something else I need to download?
