Or should I just go BeOS?
April 1, 2010 11:50 AM Subscribe
Help a lapsed linux user pick a distro with which to return to the fold.
I switched over to using Linux full time back in 2000 with Red Hat. From there I moved on to Debian and then, when Ubuntu came onto the scene, I transitioned to that.
I used Linux as my sole desktop environment for about eight years. I was never a power user, but I became relatively proficient at the command line and was comfortable fiddling with XF86Config and rc.d.
Then, about two years ago, my ancient laptop running a somewhat out-of-date build of Feisty Fawn finally called it quits.
I was the recipient of a generous hand-me-down in the form of a Toshiba Satellite 2410 laptop with a 1.8GHz p4 processor. It came with a copy of Windows XP pre-installed. The last version of Windows I had used was Win 98, so I was pretty impressed with how far the OS had come and, for the first time in a decade, I was a Microsoft user again. But now the honeymoon is over. I got infected with the Conficker worm and, upon eliminating it and installing a new security update from Microsoft, my computer is now rebooting randomly and telling me that my copy of windows is not authentic.
That may well be the case. The most expedient course of action seems to be wiping the system and installing Linux.
The thing is that, not long ago, I actually did try installing Jaunty Jackalope on a second partition and was decidedly unimpressed with it. The boot-up time of JJ on this machine was slower than that of DD on my old 566Mhz p3; the new GNOME interface seemed slower and clunkier than I remembered; and my network card, despite being a common Linksys PCMCIA card, was not recognized.
Was it just a freaky bad experience, or has Ubuntu dropped the ball?
So please, what distribution would you recommend to a Linux veteran looking for a smooth and enjoyable return to the fold?
My specific requirements:
- Run lightning-fast on a 1.8GHz p4.
- Comes with WINE either pre-installed and configured or as a drop-and-play package.
- Excellent hardware detection and automatic configuration (bonus points if it is known to play well with the Satellite 2410)
- Uncluttered and usable default GUI (back in the day, I was a big fan of blackbox WM with no desktop environment)
Any suggestions?
And, of course, if you think I should give Ubuntu another try, I'm happy to hear your case.
I switched over to using Linux full time back in 2000 with Red Hat. From there I moved on to Debian and then, when Ubuntu came onto the scene, I transitioned to that.
I used Linux as my sole desktop environment for about eight years. I was never a power user, but I became relatively proficient at the command line and was comfortable fiddling with XF86Config and rc.d.
Then, about two years ago, my ancient laptop running a somewhat out-of-date build of Feisty Fawn finally called it quits.
I was the recipient of a generous hand-me-down in the form of a Toshiba Satellite 2410 laptop with a 1.8GHz p4 processor. It came with a copy of Windows XP pre-installed. The last version of Windows I had used was Win 98, so I was pretty impressed with how far the OS had come and, for the first time in a decade, I was a Microsoft user again. But now the honeymoon is over. I got infected with the Conficker worm and, upon eliminating it and installing a new security update from Microsoft, my computer is now rebooting randomly and telling me that my copy of windows is not authentic.
That may well be the case. The most expedient course of action seems to be wiping the system and installing Linux.
The thing is that, not long ago, I actually did try installing Jaunty Jackalope on a second partition and was decidedly unimpressed with it. The boot-up time of JJ on this machine was slower than that of DD on my old 566Mhz p3; the new GNOME interface seemed slower and clunkier than I remembered; and my network card, despite being a common Linksys PCMCIA card, was not recognized.
Was it just a freaky bad experience, or has Ubuntu dropped the ball?
So please, what distribution would you recommend to a Linux veteran looking for a smooth and enjoyable return to the fold?
My specific requirements:
- Run lightning-fast on a 1.8GHz p4.
- Comes with WINE either pre-installed and configured or as a drop-and-play package.
- Excellent hardware detection and automatic configuration (bonus points if it is known to play well with the Satellite 2410)
- Uncluttered and usable default GUI (back in the day, I was a big fan of blackbox WM with no desktop environment)
Any suggestions?
And, of course, if you think I should give Ubuntu another try, I'm happy to hear your case.
you might try xubuntu, which is ubuntu with xfce as the default WM/DE. It has a much lower memory footprint than gnome.
the ubuntu (and xubuntu) boot time now is really amazing if that's a big deal for you, it always surprises me.
i was a blackbox fan too, and now i use fluxbox, which is very similar (even down to config and theme compatibility), but has a whole bunch of extra features (of course I don't use the extra features though ;)).
not really sure im the right person to recommend a distro, as im still a slackware user (i have an enormously long beard), but i think xubuntu would meet your requirements the best out of what I know.
posted by robokevin at 11:57 AM on April 1, 2010 [2 favorites]
the ubuntu (and xubuntu) boot time now is really amazing if that's a big deal for you, it always surprises me.
i was a blackbox fan too, and now i use fluxbox, which is very similar (even down to config and theme compatibility), but has a whole bunch of extra features (of course I don't use the extra features though ;)).
not really sure im the right person to recommend a distro, as im still a slackware user (i have an enormously long beard), but i think xubuntu would meet your requirements the best out of what I know.
posted by robokevin at 11:57 AM on April 1, 2010 [2 favorites]
That's... a pretty old laptop.
Ubuntu is pretty much where it's at still, but in their quest to keep up with MS and Apple, they push forward with features that stress the performance of older hardware.
There are a bunch of distros designed for older hardware, I've had some luck with Damn Small Linux in the past.
posted by Oktober at 11:59 AM on April 1, 2010
Ubuntu is pretty much where it's at still, but in their quest to keep up with MS and Apple, they push forward with features that stress the performance of older hardware.
There are a bunch of distros designed for older hardware, I've had some luck with Damn Small Linux in the past.
posted by Oktober at 11:59 AM on April 1, 2010
Thing is, the big aimed-at-general-user desktop environments are more similar than different.
New distros will probably have about the same support for your wifi card, because the big problem there is that lots of wifi cards don't have open-source drivers, any approach to getting it to work involves fiddling with a copy of the proprietary driver, and they can't ship that because it's proprietary. In some cases, there's a package that will automatically download the proprietary driver from the manufacturer and try to do the right thing with it. But outside of the wifi devices with open source drivers, this is a general problem. (I'm a big old geek and ultimately got wifi working with a Linksys WMP54GS, but I don't recommend the experience.)
Your experience of Jaunty as slow was not because Ubuntu dropped the ball, but because it was running a big desktop environment that was trying to do all sorts of things automagically. The other big distros also run big desktop environments, whether Gnome or KDE, and you'd see results from them that are more similar than different.
I'd be surprised if anything didn't have Wine available in their official repositories and installable with a handful of mouse clicks.
All this said, give Lubuntu a shot. It's the lightest weight of all the pre-configured Ubuntu variants, and uses Blackbox-relation Openbox as its window manager.
posted by Zed at 12:13 PM on April 1, 2010
New distros will probably have about the same support for your wifi card, because the big problem there is that lots of wifi cards don't have open-source drivers, any approach to getting it to work involves fiddling with a copy of the proprietary driver, and they can't ship that because it's proprietary. In some cases, there's a package that will automatically download the proprietary driver from the manufacturer and try to do the right thing with it. But outside of the wifi devices with open source drivers, this is a general problem. (I'm a big old geek and ultimately got wifi working with a Linksys WMP54GS, but I don't recommend the experience.)
Your experience of Jaunty as slow was not because Ubuntu dropped the ball, but because it was running a big desktop environment that was trying to do all sorts of things automagically. The other big distros also run big desktop environments, whether Gnome or KDE, and you'd see results from them that are more similar than different.
I'd be surprised if anything didn't have Wine available in their official repositories and installable with a handful of mouse clicks.
All this said, give Lubuntu a shot. It's the lightest weight of all the pre-configured Ubuntu variants, and uses Blackbox-relation Openbox as its window manager.
posted by Zed at 12:13 PM on April 1, 2010
Ubuntu has gotten more and more annoying lately. They change default packages seemingly at random, generally going with apps that are less mature but have more eye candy. The appearance is that they're focusing on eye candy to the point of ignoring bug fixes or basic functionality. Unless you make no changes to the default install, upgrading one version to the next is pretty much a crap shoot.
I've been migrating mostly over to Crunchbang, a super lightweight distro using the openbox wm. Crunchbang 9 is Ubuntu based, but they're shifting to Debian for version 10 which is a wonderful move, imo.
posted by jjb at 12:15 PM on April 1, 2010
I've been migrating mostly over to Crunchbang, a super lightweight distro using the openbox wm. Crunchbang 9 is Ubuntu based, but they're shifting to Debian for version 10 which is a wonderful move, imo.
posted by jjb at 12:15 PM on April 1, 2010
Another recommendation for Xubuntu.
Used it daily at work on a 600Mhz Apple G4, which was dog slow on OS X, but light and snappy with Xubuntu! (Caveat: This was several versions ago. I've since moved on to another employer who was willing to give me a more modern machine, although I can't imagine that it's bloated that much in the interim.)
XFce is definitely one of the most underrated projects in the open-source ecosystem.
posted by schmod at 12:16 PM on April 1, 2010 [1 favorite]
Used it daily at work on a 600Mhz Apple G4, which was dog slow on OS X, but light and snappy with Xubuntu! (Caveat: This was several versions ago. I've since moved on to another employer who was willing to give me a more modern machine, although I can't imagine that it's bloated that much in the interim.)
XFce is definitely one of the most underrated projects in the open-source ecosystem.
posted by schmod at 12:16 PM on April 1, 2010 [1 favorite]
Try Ubuntu again. If you have Windows and couple of spare GB, then go try Wubi installer, and if you're unsatisfied, boot back to Windows and remove the file. Easy-peasy.
posted by cmiller at 12:21 PM on April 1, 2010
posted by cmiller at 12:21 PM on April 1, 2010
I use Kubuntu with absolutely no problem on my netbook. I used to use Ubuntu on my old laptop, decided to give KDE a try, and haven't looked back since. (The only draw back is EVERYTHING has to have a K in the name of the program.)
posted by token-ring at 12:26 PM on April 1, 2010
posted by token-ring at 12:26 PM on April 1, 2010
here are two old links about Linux and your computer. Perhaps, they'll help you trouble shoot.
http://www.thorstenhaas.de/toshiba2410/
http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/hosted/ubuntu-mandriva-toshiba.html
I would suggest Mandriva. Admittedly I haven;'t used it in a while, but I always like it a lot. (Currently I'm digging Win7. though.)
posted by oddman at 12:32 PM on April 1, 2010
http://www.thorstenhaas.de/toshiba2410/
http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/hosted/ubuntu-mandriva-toshiba.html
I would suggest Mandriva. Admittedly I haven;'t used it in a while, but I always like it a lot. (Currently I'm digging Win7. though.)
posted by oddman at 12:32 PM on April 1, 2010
Ubuntu is great because it makes everything so easy. But it ain't light. And Xubuntu isn't far behind.
If you need fairly easy and super fast on an old machine, try the aforementioned DSL or Puppy, both of which can do WINE.
posted by quarterframer at 12:33 PM on April 1, 2010
If you need fairly easy and super fast on an old machine, try the aforementioned DSL or Puppy, both of which can do WINE.
posted by quarterframer at 12:33 PM on April 1, 2010
Best answer: I have a laptop running Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) that's slightly more recent that yours (a Pentium M 1.6Ghz, 1GB RAM). It runs pretty nicely.
Note that Ubuntu 10.4 (Lucid) is in beta right now and will be released sometime this month. It's also a Long Term Support release, so you may put the timing of your installation into consideration. The "lighter" variations of Ubuntu should be out shortly after Lucid is released.
posted by chengjih at 1:04 PM on April 1, 2010
Note that Ubuntu 10.4 (Lucid) is in beta right now and will be released sometime this month. It's also a Long Term Support release, so you may put the timing of your installation into consideration. The "lighter" variations of Ubuntu should be out shortly after Lucid is released.
posted by chengjih at 1:04 PM on April 1, 2010
Re: The title of this thread:
BeOS is actually still around in the form of the Haiku Project.
The premature death of BeOS remains one of the great tragedies of computing. It'd be great to see it resurrected in the near future (possibly as an open-source iPad alternative?).
posted by schmod at 1:05 PM on April 1, 2010 [1 favorite]
BeOS is actually still around in the form of the Haiku Project.
The premature death of BeOS remains one of the great tragedies of computing. It'd be great to see it resurrected in the near future (possibly as an open-source iPad alternative?).
posted by schmod at 1:05 PM on April 1, 2010 [1 favorite]
Best answer: 256: “The thing is that, not long ago, I actually did try installing Jaunty Jackalope on a second partition and was decidedly unimpressed with it. The boot-up time of JJ on this machine was slower than that of DD on my old 566Mhz p3; the new GNOME interface seemed slower and clunkier than I remembered; and my network card, despite being a common Linksys PCMCIA card, was not recognized. ¶ Was it just a freaky bad experience, or has Ubuntu dropped the ball?”
You got a lemon out of a line of great cars, unfortunately. Jaunty Jackalope was a sort of clunky attempt to move up to a production-grade OS, I think.
You will find that Karmic Koala is miles beyond Jaunty was. I'm running super-fast, much faster than I was in Windows, on a 2 Ghz laptop; in fact, I've only used all 2 GHz once or twice, since I usually only have to run it at 1.2 GHz. (There's a handy clocking mechanism you can plop onto the desktop margin to keep track of this, by the way.) Moreover, Gnome has gone through a whole version number since you last tried Ubuntu, and is a whole lot smoother and spiffier, I think. There are, in fact, some amazingly pretty desktop effects now available easily in stock Ubuntu; I don't use a lot of them, but they make the experience more enjoyable.
Installing WINE on Ubuntu is now ridiculously simple: just select Ubuntu Software Center in the menu and type in "Wine" and it pops right up.
How much RAM do you have? I don't know exactly what people are saying about your laptop being old - 1.84 GHz should be plenty to run Ubuntu, honestly. I've run it with far less.
In the unlikely event that your computer won't run Ubuntu, it'll almost certainly run Xubuntu. I like DSL and Puppy a lot for tinkering, but they don't really fit what you're looking for. To be honest, the only other distro I really like for older machines is MiniME, which is based on PClinuxOS. It's a very good one, and runs smoothly and user-friendly on old machines.
posted by koeselitz at 1:10 PM on April 1, 2010 [1 favorite]
You got a lemon out of a line of great cars, unfortunately. Jaunty Jackalope was a sort of clunky attempt to move up to a production-grade OS, I think.
You will find that Karmic Koala is miles beyond Jaunty was. I'm running super-fast, much faster than I was in Windows, on a 2 Ghz laptop; in fact, I've only used all 2 GHz once or twice, since I usually only have to run it at 1.2 GHz. (There's a handy clocking mechanism you can plop onto the desktop margin to keep track of this, by the way.) Moreover, Gnome has gone through a whole version number since you last tried Ubuntu, and is a whole lot smoother and spiffier, I think. There are, in fact, some amazingly pretty desktop effects now available easily in stock Ubuntu; I don't use a lot of them, but they make the experience more enjoyable.
Installing WINE on Ubuntu is now ridiculously simple: just select Ubuntu Software Center in the menu and type in "Wine" and it pops right up.
How much RAM do you have? I don't know exactly what people are saying about your laptop being old - 1.84 GHz should be plenty to run Ubuntu, honestly. I've run it with far less.
In the unlikely event that your computer won't run Ubuntu, it'll almost certainly run Xubuntu. I like DSL and Puppy a lot for tinkering, but they don't really fit what you're looking for. To be honest, the only other distro I really like for older machines is MiniME, which is based on PClinuxOS. It's a very good one, and runs smoothly and user-friendly on old machines.
posted by koeselitz at 1:10 PM on April 1, 2010 [1 favorite]
Remember folks: a P4 at 1.8 GHz is very, very old. 2001 old. It's much slower, clock for clock, than an Intel Core processor or even an Atom.
posted by Oktober at 1:16 PM on April 1, 2010 [1 favorite]
posted by Oktober at 1:16 PM on April 1, 2010 [1 favorite]
If you are reasonably tech savvy (and on the high end of Linux savvy) Gentoo is a great option for fast hardware because you can have any crazy combo of stuff to try out quickly, and a great option for slower hardware because you can completely leave out things you don't want. For example, I avoid linking most of my apps against KDE or GNOME at all.
posted by vsync at 1:27 PM on April 1, 2010 [1 favorite]
posted by vsync at 1:27 PM on April 1, 2010 [1 favorite]
Kubuntu is running great for me on a number of computers of different power levels. You might go with regular Ubuntu (with the resulting Gnome desktop environment) if you want something more... tranquil. I was really annoyed by many problems with pre-9 versions and had been using OS X and Windows 7 over the past year and a half or so, but K/Ubuntu 9.10 has been pretty much flawless for me and is now my OS of choice for the last 3 months. Very little tweaking was necessary out of the box on three separate systems. On thing I have an issue with is the card reader on the laptop; you have to boot with the card in for Ubuntu to see it at all.
I suggest the Wubi installer if you want to test it out for a while. It lives in your Windows file system as a folder, allows you to boot into either and is easily uninstalled with no change to Windows. The Ubuntu install disc is also a live CD that you can check out without changing Windows, but be aware that the performance will be somewhat slower due to the limitations of a CD drive.
I also recommend CentOS if you like yum over apt, but it's mostly my server pick. I'm only running it on one machine as a desktop (with KDE 4), but it's a 1.6 Atom that's mostly a tester/bench machine/data collector.
posted by dozo at 1:41 PM on April 1, 2010
I suggest the Wubi installer if you want to test it out for a while. It lives in your Windows file system as a folder, allows you to boot into either and is easily uninstalled with no change to Windows. The Ubuntu install disc is also a live CD that you can check out without changing Windows, but be aware that the performance will be somewhat slower due to the limitations of a CD drive.
I also recommend CentOS if you like yum over apt, but it's mostly my server pick. I'm only running it on one machine as a desktop (with KDE 4), but it's a 1.6 Atom that's mostly a tester/bench machine/data collector.
posted by dozo at 1:41 PM on April 1, 2010
You sound like you know enough about linux to know that distros are really a mater of personal preferene, so I'm just going to cast my vote for arch: lightweight, sane, easy to configure and use without all the desktop environment bloatware, does what it says on the tin with minimal fuss.
I wouldn't know about hardware support for your laptop, although, for a 2001 model I would guess everyone would be at the same point, it's not like new drivers will be coming out any day now. Wine packages are available as well.
posted by Dr Dracator at 1:48 PM on April 1, 2010
I wouldn't know about hardware support for your laptop, although, for a 2001 model I would guess everyone would be at the same point, it's not like new drivers will be coming out any day now. Wine packages are available as well.
posted by Dr Dracator at 1:48 PM on April 1, 2010
One note, since I guess it needs to be said: Do not use Wubi. Wubi is broken.
It was a neat project a while ago, but it's not a good idea right now. I don't think it even works with Karmic.
posted by koeselitz at 1:51 PM on April 1, 2010
It was a neat project a while ago, but it's not a good idea right now. I don't think it even works with Karmic.
posted by koeselitz at 1:51 PM on April 1, 2010
Although - I spoke too soon! Looks like they're rolling out a new version of Wubi with Lucid!
I still wouldn't try Wubi + Karmic - doesn't really work at all - but maybe this is worth waiting a little for.
posted by koeselitz at 1:53 PM on April 1, 2010
I still wouldn't try Wubi + Karmic - doesn't really work at all - but maybe this is worth waiting a little for.
posted by koeselitz at 1:53 PM on April 1, 2010
Response by poster: Heh. I'm really glad that I stopped trying to keep up with new hardware. I remember, back in the 90s, I used to play all the hot new video games and would spend hours or days debating whether I was better off getting the Voodoo2 or the RIVA TNT. I was intimately familiar with all the latest coprocessors and their respective clock and bus speeds. Then, somewhere along the line I stopped fetishizing computer hardware.
This laptop is the fastest computer I've ever owned, and I feel quite confident that it should be able to support my needs for quite some time yet. That said, I hadn't realized how old it was. I thought I was asking "what distro doesn't require the absolute newest hardware to run at a zippy speed?" when I was really asking "what distro will still run good and fast on a ten year old dinosaur of a machine?". Thanks for setting me straight.
Given what everyone here has said, I think I will give Ubuntu another shot, though I might wait until the next LTS release as chengjih suggests. If that's still too chunky, I'll try Xubuntu with fluxbox.
And to those suggesting Wubi: That's not really what I'm looking for. I'm quite comfortable making the jump to a fresh Linux install. I don't need a Windows install wizard holding my hand. It's just that I'd like to pick the right distro before I go through all the trouble of installing it, getting it configured and then deciding that I should really have installed, say, Gentoo instead.
posted by 256 at 2:04 PM on April 1, 2010
This laptop is the fastest computer I've ever owned, and I feel quite confident that it should be able to support my needs for quite some time yet. That said, I hadn't realized how old it was. I thought I was asking "what distro doesn't require the absolute newest hardware to run at a zippy speed?" when I was really asking "what distro will still run good and fast on a ten year old dinosaur of a machine?". Thanks for setting me straight.
Given what everyone here has said, I think I will give Ubuntu another shot, though I might wait until the next LTS release as chengjih suggests. If that's still too chunky, I'll try Xubuntu with fluxbox.
And to those suggesting Wubi: That's not really what I'm looking for. I'm quite comfortable making the jump to a fresh Linux install. I don't need a Windows install wizard holding my hand. It's just that I'd like to pick the right distro before I go through all the trouble of installing it, getting it configured and then deciding that I should really have installed, say, Gentoo instead.
posted by 256 at 2:04 PM on April 1, 2010
I'm going to briefly mention Zenwalk, simply because I've had good luck with it.
Standard disclaimers apply, my hardware (which Zenwalk likes) may not be yours, etc. etc.
posted by gimonca at 3:19 PM on April 1, 2010
Standard disclaimers apply, my hardware (which Zenwalk likes) may not be yours, etc. etc.
posted by gimonca at 3:19 PM on April 1, 2010
256: "The thing is that, not long ago, I actually did try installing Jaunty Jackalope on a second partition and was decidedly unimpressed with it. The boot-up time of JJ on this machine was slower than that of DD on my old 566Mhz p3; the new GNOME interface seemed slower and clunkier than I remembered; and my network card, despite being a common Linksys PCMCIA card, was not recognized."
If you notice the bootup time is still too slow, then you might try installing bootchart. If there's any long periods of time where nothing happens, that's a good first place to look. And any one process with a lot of I/O is another thing to look into, especially if it's a shell script.
If you disliked the old interface, well, it's going to change. Maybe not for the better?
PCMICIA has improved, but your card's old enough that I don't know if anyone bothers to fix it. Maybe search launchpad for the model number and see if anyone's reported a bug or fix.
posted by pwnguin at 5:46 PM on April 1, 2010
If you notice the bootup time is still too slow, then you might try installing bootchart. If there's any long periods of time where nothing happens, that's a good first place to look. And any one process with a lot of I/O is another thing to look into, especially if it's a shell script.
If you disliked the old interface, well, it's going to change. Maybe not for the better?
PCMICIA has improved, but your card's old enough that I don't know if anyone bothers to fix it. Maybe search launchpad for the model number and see if anyone's reported a bug or fix.
posted by pwnguin at 5:46 PM on April 1, 2010
Main thing with running new distros on old hardware is having enough RAM. If you don't have at least 512MB in the box, you're probably going to want something specifically aimed at old machines.
I run Ubuntu Gutsy on the same Dell Inspiron 8200 I bought for a vast amount of money in 2001. It's got a 1.7GHz Mobile Pentium IV, 512MB of PC133 RAM, and a 60GB 5400RPM drive, and nVidia GeForce 4 Go video, and I've never found it annoyingly slow. At some point I will probably update it to Lucid, though now thanks to Zed I'm interested in seeing how Lubuntu will run.
My main reasons for sticking with the Ubuntu family is that I'm interested in well-supported alternatives to Windows for the purpose of subverting the dominant paradigm in my neighborhood (there are lots of ex-Windows boxes in houses near me) and I want to be able to recommend and install something that by and large Just Works and doesn't frighten civilians. So I'm a little dark on Canonical at the moment for fartarsing about with the default placement of window controls. I hope they come to their senses before the official Lucid release, but it's looking unlikely; Shuttleworth seems determined to defend his design team against all comers.
posted by flabdablet at 6:13 PM on April 1, 2010
I run Ubuntu Gutsy on the same Dell Inspiron 8200 I bought for a vast amount of money in 2001. It's got a 1.7GHz Mobile Pentium IV, 512MB of PC133 RAM, and a 60GB 5400RPM drive, and nVidia GeForce 4 Go video, and I've never found it annoyingly slow. At some point I will probably update it to Lucid, though now thanks to Zed I'm interested in seeing how Lubuntu will run.
My main reasons for sticking with the Ubuntu family is that I'm interested in well-supported alternatives to Windows for the purpose of subverting the dominant paradigm in my neighborhood (there are lots of ex-Windows boxes in houses near me) and I want to be able to recommend and install something that by and large Just Works and doesn't frighten civilians. So I'm a little dark on Canonical at the moment for fartarsing about with the default placement of window controls. I hope they come to their senses before the official Lucid release, but it's looking unlikely; Shuttleworth seems determined to defend his design team against all comers.
posted by flabdablet at 6:13 PM on April 1, 2010
I don't need a Windows install wizard holding my hand. It's just that I'd like to pick the right distro before I go through all the trouble of installing it, getting it configured and then deciding that I should really have installed, say, Gentoo instead.
That's the point of Wubi in this context, I think. You can try an Ubuntu distro and find out how it performs on your laptop without going through the rigamarole. If it doesn't work, you uninstall it and continue your search. If it works, you go through the installation and configuration knowing exactly what to expect. I don't think anyone's suggesting you use a Wubi install on a long-term basis.
posted by chazlarson at 6:23 PM on April 1, 2010
That's the point of Wubi in this context, I think. You can try an Ubuntu distro and find out how it performs on your laptop without going through the rigamarole. If it doesn't work, you uninstall it and continue your search. If it works, you go through the installation and configuration knowing exactly what to expect. I don't think anyone's suggesting you use a Wubi install on a long-term basis.
posted by chazlarson at 6:23 PM on April 1, 2010
For a machine of that vintage, you almost certainly can't go wrong with Puppy Linux. I've installed it several older machines, and man, it's great. Lots of fun upgrades and a great community. They've also thought through just about everything you'd want to do on a desktop computer and tried to provide solutions that are lightweight and capable.
Since you mentioned WINE, you might try this version, which seems to cover the bases well.
posted by circular at 7:19 PM on April 1, 2010
Since you mentioned WINE, you might try this version, which seems to cover the bases well.
posted by circular at 7:19 PM on April 1, 2010
Looks like there won't be an official Lubuntu variant for Ubuntu 10.04. But there'll be an unofficial one.
posted by Zed at 1:03 PM on April 9, 2010
posted by Zed at 1:03 PM on April 9, 2010
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posted by Tomorrowful at 11:56 AM on April 1, 2010