User:Saebjorn/netbook

The Troublesome Ubuntu Netbook: Two Cases of a Linux Newbie Flailing Around
Situation:

I have a somewhat new Asus Eee PC 900. I got it off of Woot.com, and it has only a 4GB hard drive. Normally, this would REALLY suck, but the price made me just shrug it off. I removed the manufacturer's OS and replaced it with the Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix.

Everything went really well, until about a month ago, when I totally, totally ran out of space. Every personal, nonsystem file was deleted. Nothing is on the computer anymore, except for what came with it, and Google Chrome.

But still, I only have about 200MB free at the most, after running "sudo apt-get clean", clearing the cache, and removing some Braille-teletype program thingy, which I don't need.

This is a huge problem now, because I keep getting nagged to install the new update, Karmic Koala. And I don't even have enough space for that. Or the updates to the other programs I have.

I need to:


 * 1) Remove Firefox entirely. Every package that's there. I need all the space I can get.
 * 2) Remove anything else unnecessary that you could possibly think of.
 * 3) Fully uninstall OpenOffice.
 * 4) It'd be nice if it could support Flash...well. Well enough to play videos on Youtube.
 * 5) Find a way to clear some other stuff up. Just...pretty much anything that isn't essential to web browsing that got installed by default

My ultimate goals are to:


 * 1) Have room to install update 9.10
 * 2) Get it working to the point where I can play Youtube videos.

Thank you all so much for the help!

Saeb (talk jorn ) 02:51, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
 * To remove all traces of something you can purge it. From a terminal run "sudo apt-get purge [packagename]", or if you use Synaptic I think it's a right-click and "Mark for Complete Removal". You can go through a list of installed packages in Synaptic and remove everything you don't need. In addition you can head to System -> Administration -> Computer Janitor which will suggest unused packages to be removed and other changes to save space. Be very careful, though, as this Janitor has a reputation for being a bit...overenthusiastic. Once you're done removing you can "sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree". However this may not be required as YouTube is betatesting an HTML5 player which would be supported by Chrome without any additional plugins. It's worth a look if you don't mind losing fullscreen. Xenon54 / talk / 03:01, 23 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Why choose something as big as Ubuntu - even Ubuntu Netbook Remix is quite hefty for a small disk and small memory system. There are plenty of lightweight linux distros available which would still play YouTube videos, if that's all you want to do with it.  Astronaut (talk) 09:28, 23 February 2010 (UTC)