Installin Ubuntu 10.10 on a small laptop

[Gotlieb]

Hi Everyone,

I need some advice, I have a tiny laptop at home with 1GB Ram, 160GB Hard Disk and its currently running WinXP. Would it go well if I install Ubuntu? "/

[ballantony]

I'm running 11.10 on something with the same spec. Why not try booting from a USB or CD first?

[nothingspecial]

I have found that Lubuntu runs far better than Ubuntu on my netbook with 1gig ram. Try them both.

[Gotlieb]

Hi ballantony,

Thanks, I am a bit worried on how it will run. I have no CD rom on this laptop at all. Does this mean I have to send the ISO over to a USB and boot straight from that?

[ballantony]

You can't just copy it straight across, you need to use something like unetbootin http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ on a linux machine or pendrivelinux http://www.pendrivelinux.com/ if you are creating it on a windows machine.

It's a good way to try different distros to see which is best. (you could try lubuntu as well like @nothingspecial suggests)

[TBABill]

You can just install Unetbootin and then it's simple to make a bootable USB. I ran Lubuntu from a flash drive on a netbook with the Atom N450 processor and 1GB RAM and I ended up forgetting it was running from USB and not installed on the HDD. It ran so much better than Win7 starter. Only concern I had was backing up Windows so I could reinstall if something went wrong, wouldn't work later or if I just needed Windows for something. I could dual-boot, no problem, but I wanted my Windows backed up to DVD and had no ability to do that since I didn't own an external DVD writer. For $25 it could be a life saver if you bork the install and overwrite something critical to your Windows install and need Windows later.

[Gotlieb]

Err, wait I'm confused. Does this mean I have to install "Unetbootin" on a Linux computer and only than will moving it across to a flash drive?

Help :(