New images have pop up on cdimage.ubuntu.com. Finally, Lubuntu is out of the Ubuntu factory 🙂 (It’s still young images, which for now, are oversized, don’t load the desktop session, and have wrong splash images .. they should be better in the future)

For people who don’t know Lubuntu, this is a quick presentation. Lubuntu is a distribution based on Ubuntu, and the LXDE desktop environment. The main goal is to provide a very lightweight distribution, but with all the advantages of the Ubuntu world (repositories, support …). Currently we are using :

Chromium for the browser

Openbox for the windows manager

Pcmanfm for the file manager

Abiword + Gnumeric for office work

Pidgin for IM

Audacious for playing music

Gnome-mplayer for videos

Some GNOME components : evince, file-roller, gnome-keyring

Most of the LXDE components

You can find the complete list of applications by default on the wiki.

After 2 years of work, and 3 "unofficial" releases (10.04, 10.10 and 11.04), we had recently an official go from the Technical Board and ISO images are now made like other Ubuntu flavors. I hope the 11.10 will be the 1st official release of Lubuntu as a member of the Ubuntu family 🙂

We have 2 important particularities. Like Xubuntu, we use another GTK-based desktop environment than GNOME, and we try to avoid unnecessary GNOME depends which could slow the system. We need some GNOME parts because LXDE doesn’t provide all necessary components. It’s the reason why we are very careful about dependencies of those applications.

We are also very strict with ressources requirement. It’s the reason why we don’t include all Ubuntu specific applications. For example, we don’t include Software-Center because it’s still a bit heavy for some of our targets.

I would like to thanks all people who make this happen, especially Mark, Colin and Emmet, and all people involved in the development of Lubuntu and LXDE.

If you want to talk to the Lubuntu community, you can use our mailing list (lubuntu-desktop at lists.launchpad.net) or IRC : #lubuntu on freenode. You can also find information on our wiki.