Precise Pangolin Minimal Install with MATE

Been using Precise Pangolin for about a week or so (mostly with GNOME 3), I like it so far, but I'm sort of missing GNOME 2... So comes MATE to the rescue.

GNOME 3 with a handful of extensions mimics its predecessor quite well, but it is not the same thing, and the same goes for the so called Fall Back alternatives; Unity is not my cup of tea, at least for the moment...

A viable alternative, then, might be Debian's Squeeze, but, I do like the 5 years of updates for a desktop that Precise Pangolin's LTS offers.. I'm old, and lazy, and I quite like the LTS's ability to install and forget; on my laptops (mostly old Thinkpads) Lucid Lynx didn't had a major problem with the myriad of updates along the years.

This is a quick test I did on a Dell Inspiron 1000 (Mobile Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.20GHz) with 768 MB of RAM and a 20 GB IDE HDD.

Install Precise Pangolin, from the Mini CD installer, making it as thin and as unbloated as possible, tried using the Alternate CD installer, but, even burned to CD I got the same error than before...

After that, and after installing any necessary updates, make a full fledged MATE installation, with the CLI only installation the system will be using about 1 GB of HDD

voyager:~$ df -ah 
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1        17G  1.2G   15G   8% /
proc               0     0     0    - /proc
sysfs              0     0     0    - /sys
none               0     0     0    - /sys/fs/fuse/connections
none               0     0     0    - /sys/kernel/debug
none               0     0     0    - /sys/kernel/security
udev            335M  4.0K  335M   1% /dev
devpts             0     0     0    - /dev/pts
tmpfs           137M  280K  137M   1% /run
none            5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none            342M     0  342M   0% /run/shm

Install some programs I need and the necessary X Window:

voyager:~$ sudo apt-get install xorg emacs23-nox openssh-server

And then add the MATE repository to the bottom of the sources.list file:

voyager:~$ sudo emacs /etc/apt/sources.list

Add this:

## -----------------------------------------------
## MATE
deb http://packages.mate-desktop.org/repo/ubuntu precise main
## -----------------------------------------------

Then start the proper MATE installation:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mate-archive-keyring
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mate-core

It will need to download 182 MB and installs about 500 MB of files.
After the installation is complete, the system will be using about 2 GB of HDD.

sudo apt-get install mate-desktop-environment

This will download 17 MB and use 42 MB HDD. Be aware there is an interactive setup involved, for the program hddtemp.

When that finishes, you can start using it, by typing:

startx

After that, install other apps as needed:

sudo apt-get install chromium-browser pidgin

Only app I'm missing, but, really, really missing is Gnome Global Menu...
The laptop feels quite snappy.