Hi,

My server is running Ubuntu Server 11.10. I'm using the server as a media server, running media-tomb.
The computer has an intel pentium 4 2.8Ghz processor, and 768mb RAM. It's not much, but it's enough for its purpose.

Now I've decided that as well as using it as a media server, I will use it as an HTPC.
So the first thing to do would be to install Xorg, to get any kind of graphics. Then I'm planning on installing xbmc-live. This will make the computer automatically run the xbmc session on boot, and login as the user xbmc.
XBMC will be the primary interface, but I want to have the ability to launch other programs from within xbmc.

Using the advanced launcher plugin, you can launch any program, or run a script. So I intend to have launchers to Songbird (for better media player layouts for playlists for partys, etc), and maybe firefox too. I guess then that I'll need a window manager (and desktop environment?). I dont want to just install gnome or similar, as most of the time I wont be using it, so dont want wasted resources.
So shall I just install xfce, or lxde? Or can I get something much lighter? I only need to be able to see the songbird or firefox window, not move it around or resize or anything, just have the program on the screen, and be able to quit it to go back to xbmc.

Thinking about that though, if I have xbmc start on boot, as I want to do using xbmc-live, will I be able to just start a program from the launcher? Because presumably there's then no DE runnning, or window manager at all? Or would I need to not use xbmc-live, and instead automatically log into a light DE on boot, and have xbmc as a start up program? I'd rather not do it that way as it would take longer and un-necessarily use resources..

So does anytone know a way of to achive what I have described, and what would be the lightest window managers and DEs that can acheive this, bearing in mind I want as light as possible, considering my limited hardware?

Thanks for any help with this.

I'm not sure if I've posted this is the right section of ther forums, but it is based on installing software starting from a server installation, so I hope that's ok.

Edmund.

For your purposes a simple window manager is exactly what you need, like Fluxbox, Openbox, FVWM(2), ... .

Openbox is a great choice; it gives you only a blank screen, you launch your application with alt+f2 or the right-click menu, no distractions.