Welcome to Xubuntu, an official flavor of the world’s most popular free operating system, Ubuntu Linux, built around the lightweight Xfce graphical desktop environment. It is oriented towards low-end machines and computers with old hardware components.
Distributed as 64-bit and 32-bit Live DVDs
This Xubuntu edition is distributed as Live DVD ISO images that contain software packages optimized for both both 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x86_64) instruction set architectures. Both ISOs have approximately 1 GB in size and can be deployed on either USB thumb drives or DVD discs.
The boot options are standard
The Live DVD boot menu is unchanged from previous Xubuntu releases, allowing the user to try the distribution without installing it, to check the bootable medium for errors (only if booting from a DVD media), start the installer directly, run a memory diagnostic test, as well as to boot an existing OS from the first disk drive detected by the BIOS.
Please note that if you don’t press a key on your keyboard in ten seconds from the moment you boot the ISO image from the BIOS of your computer, the Live DVD will automatically start and drop you to the graphical session.
Xfce is in charge of the graphical session
As mentioned, Xubuntu is built around the Xfce desktop environment, which is quite lightweight and low on resources, suitable for computers with old or semi-old hardware components. It offers a classic layout comprised of a panel located on the upper part of the screen and a traditional main menu with built-in search functionality.
Comes pre-loaded with lightweight apps
Being designed from the ground up to be as low on resources as possible, Xubuntu comes pre-loaded with lightweight apps, among which we can mention the AbiWord word processor, Gnumeric spreadsheet editor, gmusicbrowser audio player, Mozilla Thunderbird email and news client, Xfburn CD/DVD burning software, Parole media player, Pidgin multi-protocol insant messenger, as well as the Mozilla Firefox web browser.
