The Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE) [1] is a flyweight among the desktop environments. Needing a minimum of just 45MB of memory, the LXDE desktop is light enough to run on low-powered notebooks or older computers with only 128MB RAM and a Pentium II CPU (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The lightweight LXDE desktop can run on antique hardware.

The ultra-lightweight LXDE has built a loyal following in the Linux community for its ability to conserve resources and run on old hardware. LXDE is actually the default desktop for Knoppix, and the LXDE-based Ubuntu variant Lubuntu typically outperforms other alternative Ubuntus at the DistroWatch site [2]. The LXDE desktop first found its way into the Mandriva and Fedora repositories by 2006, and later it became available for Debian and openSUSE. Android and the free router firmware OpenWrt also support LXDE. Many other distributions offer packages or installation images with LXDE, and you'll even find versions of LXDE for OpenSolaris [3] and various BSD systems [4]. The individual LXDE modules are all suitable for independent operation in other POSIX-compliant [5] environments, and the LXDE desktop observes all the rules [6] created by the Free Desktop Project and defined as the Linux Standard Base (LSB) [7].

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