Old Celeron Lappy [Archive]

WolfLust

July 10th, 2009, 08:22 AM

I have recently purchased a used Celeron laptop (Dell Inspiron 1100) and installed Ubuntu Desktop 9.04 on it which rendered the usability slow and annoying.

I suppose GNOME is pretty unfair to such a laptop so I'm going to try installing XUBUNTU 9.04 tonight and see how that goes.

Any thoughts on the matter? I am pretty certain that with Xfce the laptop should be more usable.

If you're wondering why anyone with half a brain would purchase such an old laptop, well the answer's pretty simple. It got it for $65 along with a wireless USB adapter. I'll surely find tons of things to do with it (beside playing dos games on it through a dos emulator).

lemuriaX

July 10th, 2009, 08:32 AM

I would if possible, get more RAM for it. And maybe build up from a minimal install so you can keep it really lightweight.

http://psychocats.net/ubuntu/minimal
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD

WolfLust

July 10th, 2009, 08:49 AM

Honestly, I don't care much about this laptop and I doubt I'd upgrade it, I just want to use it for general testing purposes and some web surfing till I get a decent laptop.

I suppose I'm going to try Xubuntu, and if it is still slow then I'll move to DSL or Puppy for the fun of trying a new distro

lemuriaX

July 10th, 2009, 09:02 AM

Crunchbang might be a nice option too, I haven't tried it but have read good things. It's Ubuntu based.

http://crunchbanglinux.org/

WolfLust

July 10th, 2009, 09:12 AM

Looks brilliant, thanks a lot.

Are you located in Lebanon?

lemuriaX

July 11th, 2009, 12:11 AM

Are you located in Lebanon?

Nope just saw your post -- I tend to always have some old machines around I like to experiment with so is always an interesting topic.

WolfLust

July 17th, 2009, 07:39 AM

I installed Xubuntu but firefox is still eating up all the CPU resources, and firefox crashes when I limit its CPU consumption.

I'll give DSL 4.4.10 a try today.

lemuriaX

July 17th, 2009, 11:55 PM

Hmmm..yeah Firefox can be a bit of a resource hog. Maybe check out this thread:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1193567

Or could look into running Swiftfox or even Seamonkey.

DSL is pretty nice especially considering it will run on really low spec hardware -- as is Puppy. Some people really like slitaz, haven't tried that one yet.

WolfLust

July 18th, 2009, 08:32 AM

I tried DSL yesterday, it's the lightest thing I've seen hehehe, I really liked that about it. I'm still having trouble connecting the USB wireless controller though. Will try to solve that issue in a day or two.

I downloaded Puppy, will check it out asap.

Brilliant link you've shared, I will try some of the tweaks soon as I really rather stick to Xubuntu.