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I have a new BeagleBone Black. I wanted to install Ubuntu 13.04 in which I have succeeded, but then I wanted a GUI, in this case the Ubuntu Desktop itself.

Can anyone tell me how long it will take installing the Ubuntu-desktop?

It's been 3 hours of: Selecting... Unpacking... Selecting... Unpacking... etc.

Elder Geek
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user167188
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  • This seems like an ongoing process of installing packages. It *should* not take hours, but depending on your system it is certainly possible. Any specific reason you can think of for why it is so slow? What disk is in there for example? What other system specifications does it have? (CPU, memory, etc.) – gertvdijk Jun 14 '13 at 13:32
  • I cannot really think of another reason. I don't use the flash memory of the BBB, but the micro SD card slot. I cannot look now for what kind of micro SD card it is. The BBB has a 700MHz ARM CPU, 512MB of DDR3 RAM memory. – user167188 Jun 14 '13 at 13:35
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    You'd probably do better to start with a more complete distribution like http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardUbuntu. Those flash writes are slow and apt-get wasn't really expecting micro-puters when it was written. – msw Jun 14 '13 at 13:37
  • Ah I see now... this is not a regular PC, but an embedded device with very slow flash storage. Yes, this will take a very long time indeed. Ext4 filesystem isn't really optimized for this kind of storage. – gertvdijk Jun 14 '13 at 13:38
  • Okay, thank you for this information. I'll vote you guys both. – user167188 Jun 14 '13 at 13:40
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    Ubuntu won't run very well on the BB. You may want to have a look at the minimal install options. You install that one, and then install X on it, and a minimal desktop. Like lxde or xfce. Or just fluxbox/icewm. Whatever floats your boat. I know it's not *that* simple, but do not be afraid, it's not hard either. It's actually quite simple. (It's just "sudo apt-get install lightdm xorg lxde" for example. Isn't that simple?) Grab it here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD – Apache Jun 14 '13 at 14:11

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