Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> __/ [ Da'Punk-A ] on Friday 19 May 2006 18:14 \__
>
> >
> > Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> >> A Linux Distribution for an Old Laptop
> >>
> >> ,----[ Quote ]
> >> | D. Travis North found himself in need for a Linux Distribution on his
> >> | old laptop, so he started testing different distributions on his
> >> | machine, read on to see the results he got...
> >> `----
> >>
> >>
> http://www.linuxforums.org/desktop/a_linux_distribution_for_an_old_laptop.html
> >
> > It's a shame Mr North saw KDE as "essential" for his laptop.
>
>
> An _OLD_ laptop, to make matters worse. He should have got something like
> Xubuntu for a responsive desktop experience, depending on how much he has
> going on at once (e.g. processes, JRE applications, virtual desktops and so
> forth).
>
> Addendum: I have only just spotted (commenting as I go along) that you
> thought the same thing as me, namely Xubuntu. My suggestion was independent.
>
>
> > I have an old laptop - Windows98 vintage (its got a shiny badge
> > proclaiming it "Designed for Microsoft Windows98" and a key bearing the
> > Windows window pane symbol) - it has a 450 MHz processor, 156 MB RAM
> > and a 4 GB HDD. Not exactly bleeding edge specs.
>
>
> My old Windows 98 laptop had 32 MB of memory, a 400 MHz AMD processor, and 3
> hard-drives occupied it over the years. It didn't have enough RAM to have
> Ubuntu 4 installed.
My laptop's previous owner upgraded the RAM to 156 MB. It was 32 MB to
begin with, I think. I wish she'd stuck a larger HDD in it as well. 4
GB is so tiny nowadays. I've installed hardly anything other than the
xubuntu stuff. All my music's on CD-Rs, a couple of albums would fill
the hard disk.
> > When I decided to scrape Windows off it, I installed Ubuntu. But the
> > Gnome desktop was pretty slow. Not as slow as I'd feared it might be,
> > but still slow.
> >
> > So I installed the xubuntu-desktop. That's based on xfce, and it's
> > great. Okay, it's not as pretty as Gnome or KDE and it lacks a few of
> > their features, but what can you expect from an /old/ laptop? As far
> > as I'm concerned, Xubuntu has given the laptop a new lease of life - a
> > box that was in danger of being outmoded has been rendered perfectly
> > usable.
> >
> > Mr North gave K/Ubuntu a poor score because its "large memory
> > footprint" made it uninstallable on his machine. But if he'd done a
> > server install, then downloaded the xubuntu-desktop, I think his
> > conclusions may have been very different.
>
>
> Interesting. So he had the same problem as mine: insufficient memory.
> Frankly, as you can see, I have not read the review in depth, but so many
> people are reviving old laptops nowadays, so I thought it was relevant.
Linux is great for reviving old hardware, as I expect everyone here
knows. Laptops used to be a problem, but Ubuntu (the distro I have
experience of) is great at hardware detection now, I've had no problems
with any of my laptop's features except for the winmodem.
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