Ubuntu for an old laptop?

[Barney_DK]

Hi,
I was given a laptop as "full of viruses (is that Viri actually) and spyware" by a mate a few weeks back, and within a few days had it up and running with Suse 9.3 for the girlfriend to play around on.

But the problem is, its so SLOWWWW... I know KDE is a bit greedy, but she needs something "similar" to windows to work with.
I have been hearing lots of rave reviews about Ubuntu on here recently and have started to look into switching over to that before she starts filling up the hard drive with data.

But with only 256MB of RAM, is Ubuntu going to make any difference to me on this machine? I have not used Gnome before, but from the screenshots, it looks friendly enough. I also have a Dlink wireless card which I heard is fairly well supported under Ubuntu.


The laptop has around 1.5ghz celeron, and 256 RAM, with an old ATI graphics card.

Any recommendations/nightmare turn offs???

[beetlespace]

I have a Thinkpad 600e with ~256 MB RAM and a PII. I have tried with sucess the following distros:

Fedora Core3
Ubuntu
Kubuntu
SuSE 9.2
SuSE 9.1?
Damn Small Linux
Slackware 10.2

Out of them all the fastest was by far Damn Small Linux, but this would not give you the user-friendliness you are after. I currently have Slackware installed but not without a little tweaking. I would reccommend Kubuntu. It has the KDE desktop, and all the support of the Ubuntu community.

[tlyons]

Debian or Kubuntu.

[quip]

Hi,

The laptop has around 1.5ghz celeron, and 256 RAM, with an old ATI graphics card.

With those specs, you _should_ be able to run KDE or gnome w/o problem. That being said, if you are still experiencing slowness, then your "old" graphics card, or some default settings, might be causing this. A few ideas:

1. Turn off any unneeded services at boot time.

2. Instead of changing distros, change the DE/WM. Some of the stripped-down window managers may not give your girl the windows-feel, but my wife used xfce for a while with no complaint.

3. When you really get down to it, it's the apps, not the wm/de, that give non-techies comfort. Look for apps light on resources that still have a familiar, nice-looking interface, like firefox and thunderbird.

4. If you stick with kde, most of the defaults are okay, but your distro might have turned on some unnecessary eye-candy. Go into the control panel and make sure no transparency effects are on.

[eskiled]

Hi. I just installed Ubuntu (hoary) on a simliar machine (2.0 celeron, 128mb) this past weekend. Gnome was slow, so I switched to xfce4 for a while and noticed a huge difference. I suggest you do that; doubt you'll miss anything from Gnome/KDE that xfce doesn't have...

[Parcival]

I can second that; a friend of mine got a 200MHz/128MB laptop this week and installed Ubuntu with XFCE on it and everything runs nicely. With the RAM you stuffed in there you should have little problems.

[alikilaij]

I recently was given an old Omnibook XE2 with a 500Mhz PIII. Tried Debian and it worked fine. Settled on Kubuntu breezy 2 days ago and it runs like a champ. My personal laptop is a PIII 850 with FC4 and it works flawlessly.

[Barney_DK]

Thanks for the suggestions guys.
I will take a look at the settings in KDE later, but after looking at a few screenshots for ubuntu, I think it looks friendly enough, despite small differences.

Would you recommend going with hoary (5.04) or breezy, which I can see is pretty new.

As you mentioned, I have found that the machine is a lot quicker when I run flux or windowmaker, but she wasn't a fan of that type of desktop. I have never tried xfce though, so will give it a look later.

[timothykaine]

You'll find IceWM fairly similar to Windows Classic, and its also very lightweight. You can couple that with the Xfe file manager to speed things up.

http://www.icewm.org/
http://xfe.sourceforge.net/

You should be able to apt-get both of these by uncommenting the Universe/Multiverse repository in /etc/apt/sources.list. Id recommend perhaps using Debian Testing/Etch instead of Ubuntu to keep the installation slim. In which case just apt-get will work without uncommenting anything.

[Hayl]

try xfce4, you will get a desktop similar to gnome but much lighter while still remaining full-featured.

[capaci]

i installed ubuntu on a really old laptop of my friend's. it runs alright. but i'd suggest just installing any distro and using fluxbox or some lightweight manager. i'm sure with a little guidance your girlfriend could adapt to flux.

i just checked the specs of your machine...way better than my friend's. you can probably run ubuntu with no problem.

[nephish]

i gotta go with everyone here with the xfce4 suggestion. looks a lot like gnome, its gtk2 but much faster. my wife and kids use it. they like it a lot more than fluxbox (what i use most of the time). and a lot easier on the resources.

[mmills]

eh.....?Debian or Kubuntu.

tlyons non I can see Debian but why Kubuntu, in 6 months they will have to change everything to keep up with all the new software, its about the only flaw I have with ubuntu...

[sasKuatch]

I have Debian testing on my Dell with 800mhz and 256mb of RAM and it runs fine with Gnome and tons of stuff running. The only caveat is that I have to restart X every few days to clear out the RAM. Otherwise it runs great for weeks on end without restarting; that's better than some servers. When I need some free RAM (for Jack audio apps or some games) I just switch into WindowMaker.