I’m trying to install Lubuntu on a HP T520 Thin Client with 4GB RAM and an 8GB SSD. I installed the Lubuntu 22.04.1 LTS image onto an 8GB flash drive, then rebooted to the image. All worked fine so I tried to install using the Install Lubuntu icon on the desktop. Immediately I get an error saying “This computer does not satisfy the minimum requirements for installing Lubuntu 22.04.” It says at least 8GiB is required. The KDE Partition Manager shows /dev/sda2 has 7.44 GiB available.
My internet search has not shown me anyone with this same issue. On the contrary, people say there is no official minimum, and they’ve successfully installed on drives as small as 4GB.
Can I get around this (arbitrarily imposed?) limitation to go ahead and install Lubuntu? I’m planning to use this as a NAS controller and a local Minecraft server, so very limited use.
I personally don’t QA-test install with less than 10GB (for older releases, 12GB for recent releases) and even then rarely with that size as it makes little sense to me (the install may work, but for how long?). Less disk size increases the maintenance burden on a system.
Less disk space means
you can’t add additional software
you need to ensure updates never accumulate (as that requires free space so you can download them all, prior to installing newer packages before lastly disk space is reclaimed on removal of older packages)
if SWAP is not used due to space, execution will be slower unless you have the RAM (ie. more than 4GB though it’ll depend on how it’s used, you may need more than 4GB too)
For most, the human time cost (fixing regular disk space issues) generally outweighs the cost of disk space (be it HDD or SSD)
I’ve never explored what the minimum is, but do consider the space you’re trying to use as problematic, and if I wanted to use the system, I’d likely start with a server install, then add the minimum packages you require as you need to keep free space so the system can continue to run days/weeks/months post-install. If you’re using a GUI & many apps, don’t forget to leave space for swap.
Thank you for the prompt reply, and the insight! Unfortunately I had no idea about this reasonable space limit, with all my searching about Lubuntu. The image was only 2.5GB, so I figured it used less than 4GB all in, and with 1.5GB of swap, I’d still be ok. But I guess not, so I’m off to find a smaller footprint distro. Any suggestions are welcome. Thanks again!
I did not test it, but I guess you have to avoid the swapfile. And you should remove unneeded stuff like the libreoffice-* packages.
Please do not use a Desktop Linux for server stuff. Simply use a long-term supported server version and install the necessary stuff. With a real Linux server you have
Thank you so much! It’s good to know I can modify the storage limit, but I especially appreciate your tip about the server version. I don’t really care about running a GUI so that’s a great option that I never considered. Then hopefully I can install Ubuntu server. I did just set up bunsenlabs distro, but with a server version I can hopefully go with Ubuntu which I’m more comfortable with (since it’s a popular distro).
I’ll post my results, in case anyone else stumbles across this thread in the future.