Most of the users worldwide have atleast one old low-spec hardware desktop or laptop which is biting dust in some corners of the the house. One of the reasons that these old low-spec hardware desktop or laptop is obselete and not used by us is, that most operating system these days need a whole lot of good Hardware specifications.

So any hardware which is say 3-4 years old may not work as intended. And what about those which are more than 6-7 years? Today we will talk about how to bring those old  low-spec hardware desktop laptop back to life using a variant of  Ubuntu called Lubuntu. Just yesterday, Ubuntu 11.10 was released and along with it, Lubuntu too got released.

Lubuntu is targeted at “normal” PC and laptop users running on low-spec hardware. Such users may not know how to use command line tools, and in most cases they just don’t have enough resources for all the bells and whistles of the “full-featured” mainstream distributions.

The best part of Lubuntu is the minimum Memory requirement. The minimum memory requirement for running Lubuntu 11.10 is 128 MB of RAM memory. Keep in mind that some of your system’s memory may be unavailable due to being used by the graphics card. If you are not comfortable with non-GUI installer, you can use the graphical installer from the Live-CD (Desktop ISO) but then you will need at least 256 MB of memory to use the “Install Lubuntu” entry when you boot from the Live-CD.  But if you just want to test Lubuntu without installing it and just use the Live CD for it, then  you need 384 MB at least to “Try Lubuntu without installing” .

Even with such small memory requirement, everything works fine on Lubuntu. You can use it to browse Internet using browser, or watch Movies, play multimedia files or do any other work.

Systems with less memory need to use alternate ISO, or perform a minimal installation (see Minimal Install).

Hard Disk Requirement

You need at least 4.3 GB available if you are installing it using the the graphical installer. However, you can install Lubuntu using the alternate ISO or the minimal installation instructions with less than 4 GB available.

Get Lubuntu

To download Lubuntu and see the various options available head over to Get Lubuntu. This section discusses both the standard installs and those required for computers with low memory (RAM), old chipsets (i586) and low disk-space (netbooks).