Quote:
Originally Posted by MrPLD
Speaking of rebooting etc, I must say that I'm utterly impressed with Ubuntu 10.10 on my netbook and workstations, being able to go into hibernate within a couple of seconds and restore in 3~5 seconds, including restablishing secure-wifi, finally I can now shut down my machine (well nearly shut down). The power saving isn't that great, since the workstation is only a 20W Asus B202 (the LCD consumes 55W !!) and of course the netbooks aren't much worse.
Paul
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I have Ubuntu 10.10 on an ancient (2002) Fujitsu Lifebook. The box was a gift from a friend, who upgraded to a faster system. She said it was "slow slow slow". Well, no surprise. The box has a 867mhz Transmeta Crusoe CPU, 256MB of RAM (and the CPU grabs 16MB off the top for code morphing), and a UDMA 4 HD. It came from Fujitsu with WinXP Pro SP2 installed. XP wants 512MB RAM to think about performing.
I redid it to multiboot Win2K Pro, Ubuntu, Puppy Linux, and FreeDOS. Win2K is a marginal improvement over XP on the box at best. It takes 8 minutes to boot, and is snail slow once up. Puppy is fairly sprightly if you only use the bundled apps, as it's intended for lower end kit and the apps are chosen for small size. But it's quirky and non-standard in various ways. Ubuntu is usable with a little patience.
I originally installed Xubuntu, but performance was unacceptable. Posters on the Ubuntu forums suggested that too much Gnome had crept in, and that Ubuntu had a steadily advancing idea of what "low end" was. The recommended reinstalling from the Minimal CD to get a working command line installation, then use apt-get to pick and choose what I wanted. I wanted to upgrade the Puppy install as well, so I wiped and redid the Linux slices, setting them up as ext4 filesystems, and installed Ubuntu from the Minimal CD, then added XFCE4 and preferred apps. It helped a lot.
Ubuntu and Puppy mount each other's partitions at boot and can see each other's file systems. They also mount the NTFS slice Windows lives on, and the FAT32 partition where FreeDOS is installed. Some things, like the subset of my ebook library on the notebook, live on the Windows slice, but can be seen and read from the Linux side with FBReader. I've been experimenting with having one copy of big applications like Open Office 3 shared between the Puppy and Ubuntu installations. For self-contained stuff that installs under a specific directory, like /opt/openoffice, it works well.
The biggest problem with the box is slow disk I/O, and Ubuntu can't address that. The UDMA4 HD has an 18MB/sec transfer rate. Big apps simply take a long time to load. (Firefox 3.6 takes 45 seconds to load and initialize, and is sluggish once up. I don't even try try to use it for browsing. OO 3 takes about a minute to invoke, though it is usable once it has.)
Ubuntu 10.10 did fix an annoying problem with 10.04 - the Lifebook has a native screen resolution of 1280x768. Ubuntu 9.10 recognized and used it. Ubuntu 10.04 refused to do better than 1024x768. (Tracing through logs indicated Linux was aware of the 1280x768 resolution, but I never found the place to tell it to use it.) 10.10 corrected that issue. The most recent patches fixed an annoyance with Update Manager, where it would not properly terminate after use, and had to be killed from the command line.
The current fun is playing with alternate window managers, and Fluxbox, LXDE, Openbox and a few other things are installed and selectable at login.
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Dennis