Quote:
Originally Posted by devilsadvocate
I did an Ubuntu build on a 1st-gen netbook Atom Z520 and the dreaded Poulsbo chipset; in fact said chipset was the reason I used Ubuntu, since they were one of only 2 distros which had drivers for it. Instead of using the Netbook Remix (which is an insult IMO) I got the -minimal install. It was very similar to what I'm used to in Arch; CLI (until I put Enlightenment on it), ncurses installer, just-what-I-need-and-nothing-I-don't. It worked well until a version upgrade broke the chipset support, but I put equal blame for that on both Ubuntu and Intel who shouldn't have released the POS to begin with. Instead of calling it "Alternative Minimal", they could call it "Ubuntu Pro" and get some CLI gurus in their userbase; they could clearly use the help in the forums.
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I did a MinimalCD install of Ubuntu on my old Fujitsu Lifebook p2110.
The Lifebook was a gift from a friend who had upgraded to a newer, faster machine. She loved the Lifebook, and wanted to see it go to a good home instead of being thrown out, but commented it was "slow slow slow". Well, no surprise: it came from Fujistu with a 30GB UBMA4 HD, 867mhz Crusoe processor, a whopping 256MB of RAM (of which the Crusoe grabs 16MB off the top for code morphing"), and WinXP Pro SP2. You grew old and gray waiting for anything to work.
It looked like a good candidate for Linux, so I swapped in a 40GB HD from my SO's dead laptop, repartitioned, and installed Win2K Pro, Puppy Linux, Xubuntu, and FreeDOS.
Win2K Pro seemed a better fit for a 256MB machine, but I was overly optimistic. It's almost as slow once up, and takes much longer to boot. Puppy Linux is sprightly enough, since it was intended for lower end kit, but has an assortment of quirks, such as being explicitly single user as always running as root. FreeDOS is an open source MS-DOS clone, and runs nicely. Xubuntu was a disappointment. It installed as handily as the regular version, but was snail slow. Posters on the Ubuntu forums suggested too much Gnome had crept in and it was no longer really lightweight, and that Ubuntu had a steadily advancing idea of what "low end" was. The recommended an install from the MinimalCD.
I wanted to redo the Puppy install anyway, to go to an ext4 file system, so I wiped the Puppy and Ubuntu slices and reinstalled. Ubuntu from the MinimalCD gave me a bare bones CLI installation, and I could use apt-get to selectively install the parts I wanted. Xfce4 was fine as GUI, and installing it brought along the rest of X-Windows as a dependency. It's not quite as sprightly as Puppy, but is at least usable. Large apps like Open Office or Firefox are still slow, but the problem there seems to be disk I/O, and will be present regardless.
I'm tempted to replace Win2K with Win98SE and
KernelEX, which will let me run an assortment of NT/2K/XP apps under 98. The problem is that I haven't found a way to tell Win98 "Install to
this partition." It wants to take over and wipe the whole drive. I could do that, then repartition with GPartEd and re-install Puppy, Ubuntu, and FreeDOS, but I'm not
quite up to going through the effort. (The machine does not have a floppy drive, so booting from a floppy boot disk isn't possible.)
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Dennis