I have an older windows laptop onto which I'm installing ubuntu within a VM. My goal is just to use terminal-based linux tools such as vim and shell scripting. I don't give a hoot about any gui for this box.

So I first installed ubuntu minimalcd and chose "Basic Ubuntu Server". Upon boot, the text-based terminal came up and I logged in, but the problem is it only gives me 80 columns. I want to do terminal mode vim but have a couple hundred columns to take advantage of my large monitor. If you happen to know how to do that, please see my question here .

This post is assuming that the other question is not answerable, and that I will need a desktop to get more than 80 columns in a terminal window. So if that is the case, I want the lightest weight one possible, because this is older hardware and all I want is the ability to have nice big text-based terminal windows for editing text. From the ubuntu minimal CD, I see options for Edubuntu, Kubuntu, etc. Which one of the available desktops would be a good choice for my needs?