[wellylug] Resurrected Ubuntu

Alick Wilson alick.wilson at braithwaite.co.nz
Sun Jul 11 09:53:54 NZST 2010


And I forglot to say, Distrowatch has a fairly comprehensive list of distros
for "old computers" at
http://distrowatch.com/search.php?category=Old+computers&origin=All&basedon=
All&desktop=All&architecture=All&status=Active.

I reviewed most of them and installed and tried several before shortlisting
Puppy 5, Slitaz and Lubuntu.

Alick Wilson


-----Original Message-----
From: Alick Wilson [mailto:alick.wilson at braithwaite.co.nz] 
Sent: Sunday, 11 July 2010 9:44 a.m.
To: 'Wellington Linux Users Group'
Subject: RE: [wellylug] Resurrected Ubuntu


I've had Ubuntu 9.10 running satisfactorily on old desktop and laptop, both
Pentium II 400 MHz with 256 MB memory.

Both were a bit sluggish. Performance was similar to Windows XP which I ran
on these machines earlier.

I've tried several other lightweight distros and cut my persomal shortlist
of interest to three - Puppy 5, Slitaz and Lubuntu. They are are all quicker
than Ubuntu. Each has a different look and feel. All three have merit,
depending upon what you want to achieve.

Puppy 5 is designed to run entirely in RAM. Once booted up, the old PCS
above are very quick. Puppy 5 is reminiscent of Windows 95 in a number of
ways.

Slitaz is also designed to run entirely in RAM but can be installed on hard
disk. Once booted up, the old PCS above are very quick. Slitaz uses the LXDE
desktop which is lighter and quicker than GNOME.

Lubuntu installs to a hard disk. It is not quite as quick as the other two,
but quickler than Ubuntu. It also uses the LXDE desktop. Its default browser
is Chrome, which is much quicker to load than Firefox. Lubuntu has the
advantage of being quite similar to Ubuntu in the way it operates, and
allows additional programs to be added from the Ubuntu repository.

I currently have Lubuntu installed on the old laptop as a visitors and spare
machine, used primarily for browsing.

For referenence I run Ubuntu 10.04 on my main computer (TkinkPad X61 with
2.1 GHz dual core CPU and 2 GB memory.)

Alick Wilson



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