Old hardware brought back to life

[mörgæs]

I doubt that they are following the thread but you are free to post.

[siggi2]

Thank you mörgæs, for this blog! It inspired me to get my 12 year old machine with Nvidia 2 to get to work with Xubuntu 14.04.1. This is how I did it:

The machine:

Processor: AMD Athlon XP 1700+
CPU: 1466.807 MHz i386 32bit
Memory: 1001.5 MiB
Display: NV11(GeForce 2 MX/Mx 400)
Harddisk: 80 GB

I opened http://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Grafikkarten/Nvidia/nouveau

went down to "ShadowFrame Buffer aktivieren" (activate ShadowFrame Buffer)

and followed the instructions. Here they are:

Using sudo

*** 1 ***
Create /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/

*** 2 ***
create new file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nouveau.conf
with the following text:

Section "Device"
Identifier "NvidiaGraphics"
Driver "nouveau"
Option "NoAccel" "1"
EndSection

Save this file, logoff, logon, and was happily astonished

Cheers, siggi2

P.S. Installing Xubuntu 14.04.1 was tricky on my system, because many installation-menu items disappeared, appeared and played other havoc. After the installation it still looked weird, appearing disappearing map icons, color-changing text and other havoc. However, after the ShadowFrame business, it is just beatuful!
P.P.S. And we love the reappearance of the user pictures for login - sorry Marc Shutleworth

[mörgæs]

- and thank you for your contribution.

[mattharris4]

If you receive the PAE message you have to use the forcepae flag, and I'm rather sure that it works to run that CPU with forcepae.


Yes, depending on your preferences (for example eye candy versus speed).

Lubuntu - ultra light foot-print
Xubuntu - medium light foot-print

Try both live and install the flavour you like the best. In my opinion, standard Ubuntu needs more horsepower (and more than 1 GB RAM) to work well.

-o-

It is possible to install any tools to Lubuntu, that come with Xubuntu and Ubuntu, for example pulseaudio and pavucontrol, which make it easier to get the audio system working.

Sudodus, first thank you to you and the other moderators for the work you do here. I was a moderator of a small cell phone forum for a while, fortunately we didn't have too many problems but we did have to install an anti-spam program to catch the 100 or so spammers that used automation to attempt to post advertisements on our forum every day without a lot of work on our parts.

I have played around with the different Canonical OS versions including Kubuntu via live USB session and Lubuntu, Ubuntu and Edubuntu as installed (I use Edubuntu on a daily basis). I kept an eye on the system monitor installed in these programs, I found that worst-case (in my use that is the site sfgate.com with 6-8 tabs running in Firefox) Lubuntu uses 800-1100 MB of RAM, Kubuntu uses 1000-1300 MB of RAM and Ubuntu/Edubuntu use 2200-2500MB of RAM. Just booted up without anything running except the system monitor Lubuntu uses about 250-300MB, Kubuntu about 700-800MB and Ubuntu/Edubuntu about 1000-1200MB. When I only had 2GB of RAM on my desktop running Edubuntu (Pentium 4 running at 3.0GHz) SFGate would just about crash the computer and cause it to slow down to a crawl when it went into swap in an attempt to handle the RAM load. I upped the RAM to 3.5GB (3.2GB recognized as the computer is only 32 bit) and this issue stopped. With my live USB use I found that on my low-powered laptop running a E1-2100 CPU from AMD running at 1.0GHz with 4GB RAM Lubuntu maxed out the CPU much less often than the other Canonical releases I have tried on it (Kubuntu, Ubuntu and Edubuntu) making for a much smoother experience. I have actually recently installed Lubuntu on that machine, it seems smoother than even the Windows 8.1 it came with (my installation is a dual-boot with Windows and Lubuntu so if I need to I have still access to Windows on that machine as well).

From my experience I suggest one thing -- do not depend on a swap area using a Canonical OS. In my experience swap will slow your computer to a crawl and you will need to reboot to get it working properly again. If you don't have the amount of RAM I specify in the worst-case scenario add RAM to the computer, use a lighter version of Linux (Lubuntu instead of Ubuntu for example) or find another OS to use (Puppy Linux claims it works on 128MB of RAM but others suggest 256MB for a smooth experience -- be warned that Puppy IS NOT a Canonical OS and doesn't have the large support base Canonical has as a result, from my research it sounds like 2-3 people do the bulk of the work with Puppy unlike Canonical which has hundreds of people supporting their OSes between their staff and user base which can make a big difference if you have a problem while installing or using an OS). Please thoroughly research any OS candidate you want to use before installing it to a computer you depend on! Using an OS with a small following and/or small tech support team could bite you in the rear end should you have any issues with it. Regarding Puppy, it might be a good OS, I really don't know but my advice still stands. I would actually like to play with Puppy on an old computer someday if I get hold of one (I did play around with a USB image and was not impressed with its features) but at this stage certainly would not depend on it for daily use from what I have seen but it might work better than other OSes on a computer with only 256-384MB of RAM.

[sudodus]

@ mattharris4

Welcome to the discussion in this thread, and thanks for you contribution

[mattharris4]

^ You are welcome, sudodus.

[matey3]

Thanks to mörgæs and everyone else for this thread.
I dont know if this is the right thread but here's my problem/question:

I wanted to ask about setting up a Partitionless Ubuntu using Wubi on Windows machines?
(I never really had problems before except this last time when):

My new Asus laptop crashed and would not boot into anything because of an Upgrade from windows7 to 8/8.1
It took a few months* but I finally got it up and running (win8.1 runs fine) BUT Ubuntu does not run and locks up?

1- Is there a way I could get into the Ubuntu command prompt? (The Ctrl, Alt F1 or F2 etc does not work) it acts like it is booting to X (desktop) but locks up with black screen and no msgs.

2- Is there any way that I can get Ubuntu's own boot menu back on? (I only get the 1st (main) menu with choice of MS or Ubuntu. In my PC if I choose Ubuntu I get the 2nd boot menu which I can choose diff. versions/releases etc.).
Thanks in advance!



*This info maybe too old and not useful but just in case someone is interested in problems that a win7 to 8.1 upgrade will cause:
I received windows 8 almost for free so I installed it to test and find out about it (didnt need it since my laptop doesnt have touch screen and 8/8.1 is like a tablet OS really) then when I was running win8, I got the msg that I have to upgrade to 8.1 so I did not knowing that MS deletes the backup files and if you dont have the win7 or 8 boot DVD then you are out of luck.
I had Mfg's backup partition for 7 but 8.1 deleted it. My Asus laptop did not come with win7 dvd so I ordered the win8 dvd from MS but was not useful and was no a bootable dvd!?
Anyway I could only boot into windows command prompt (safe mode didnt work either). Ubuntu would not come up at all (or I dont know if there is a trick that you can do to get into the command prompt?) so I kept running chkdsk /f (or whatever that repairs the hdd automatically within win8) to no avail until one day it took longer to run chkdsk so I left it alone and when I came back the windows 8.1 was up and running? I have not had any problems since!?
I learned from MS forums that MS deliberately deletes the backup files so in an upgrade or update if things went wrong, you could not go back and that really made me mad.
so even though this maybe an old info. but if you or your work place decided to upgrade your windows machine from 7 to 8.1 or whatever, be sure do a real backup on a separate usb drive or something.

[sudodus]

I wanted to ask about setting up a Partitionless Ubuntu using Wubi on Windows machines?
(I never really had problems before except this last time when):

My new Asus laptop crashed and would not boot into anything because of an Upgrade from windows7 to 8/8.1
It took a few months* but I finally got it up and running (win8.1 runs fine) BUT Ubuntu does not run and locks up?

Wubi does not work with Windows 8, and it is no longer supported. See this link Forums Staff recommendations on WUBI

I suggest that you run Ubuntu live from a DVD or USB drive and use it to extract your personal files (documents, pictures, video clips, music, mailboxes and bookmark files).

1- Is there a way I could get into the Ubuntu command prompt? (The Ctrl, Alt F1 or F2 etc does not work) it acts like it is booting to X (desktop) but locks up with black screen and no msgs.

ctrl + alt + F1

2- Is there any way that I can get Ubuntu's own boot menu back on? (I only get the 1st (main) menu with choice of MS or Ubuntu. In my PC if I choose Ubuntu I get the 2nd boot menu which I can choose diff. versions/releases etc.).
Thanks in advance!

It may be hard without a running Windows system. Maybe you can loop mount the file containing Ubuntu and read/extract personal files (if any) from there. But I have never done that.

... but if you or your work place decided to upgrade your windows machine from 7 to 8.1 or whatever, be sure do a real backup on a separate usb drive or something.

+1

I agree about backing up your data.

[matey3]

Thanks a lot sudodus
you are right, wubi won't work in windows 8 or any other windows any more!
in fact it wipes off your last install then gives an error that the setup files are missing from ubuntu's ftp site etc...

well maybe they had a good reason? but to me it sucks because wubi was easy to use and risk-free. I definitely do not want to lose my windows partitions/OS for lot of reasons, plus most of these machines we buy are designed/built to Windows specifications only, (for instance) I could never use my touch screen functions in Linux since there are No drivers available.
(I know if you ask dell or msi etc, for linux drivers they'll call the cops on you lol )
anyway I am not impressed ..we seem to be walking backward toward more closed source n less freedom!

Wubi does not work with Windows 8, and it is no longer supported. See this link Forums Staff recommendations on WUBI

I suggest that you run Ubuntu live from a DVD or USB drive and use it to extract your personal files (documents, pictures, video clips, music, mailboxes and bookmark files).

ctrl + alt + F1

It may be hard without a running Windows system. Maybe you can loop mount the file containing Ubuntu and read/extract personal files (if any) from there. But I have never done that.


+1

I agree about backing up your data.

[d-cosner]

I just got a P4 small form factor computer running beautifully thanks to Xubuntu 14.04 x64! It's a P4 2.8 GHz with hyper threading, Intel on-board graphics, sound and NIC, 3.5 GB DDR 2 RAM, 250 Seagate SATA hard drive and an IDE CD-ROM.

Since there was no DVD drive I had to put the hard drive in my newer computer to do the install, then put it back in the HP. After that was done I installed all the updates, rebooted and cleaned out the old kernels. I wanted to stay with the 3.13 kernel because I knew it would work well with this hardware. Next I found the ppa repos to upgrade Xfce to 4.12 and did a dist upgrade.

I turned off all of the start up services that were not needed and set the swappiness value to 10, after rebooting the system was only using 220 MB of RAM. I removed a few apps that I did not think were necessary and added and changed a few. I swapped out the default music player for Audacious, it's plenty light and blends in better with the rest of the applications. I added the gnome-disk-utility to be able to check out the condition of the hard drive too.

The computer was really running nice at this point! Application launch time is nearly instant on most applications, even Firefox loads in just a couple seconds! I installed all the restricted extras and all multimedia playback worked great, even full screen flash! I did turn off hardware acceleration in Firefox and the Flash player itself to achieve that, it's not supported in Linux anyway.

All that was left to do was give the system a nice modern look. I found a ppa with the numix theme and numix circle icons and installed them. I found a nice wallpaper to go with the new theme and things were looking really nice! I put a deskbar on the bottom of the screen, added some useful shortcuts, made it transparent and set it to intelligent hiding. I ended up with a kind of Mac style desktop that makes Xfce look pretty modern.

It took some trial and error to achieve really good results but in the end it was well worth the time! I ended up with a 10 year old computer that runs as nice as a modern system and the OS looks fresh and new. Sure, it will not play any high end video games but it is still really nice for daily use.

Edit: Almost forgot, I installed uBlock in Firefox so web pages load quicker. It's light and I have never seen any problems with it under Linux like some Windows users reported.