Linux like EeePC


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OK, so I got my mother an eeepc, and damn it flies. With such low hardware specs it's amazing!

Made me think - I have a few older laptops knocking about - could I do something similar with them?

What variant is the EeePC running? How easy would it be to put something similar - with launcher - on a previous Windows laptop?

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OK, it's using Xandros.

But my point being - is this Linux showing that it can be a great OS on a limited hardware platform? If so, going to mess with a laptop later.

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It's running a heavily modified version of Xandros. The standard version isn't going to be the same.

Similar, but not the same :p

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The Xandros on the eee is specifically modified to run with speed on the eee's hardware.

This actually causes more problems than it helps, like my only 1 month old eee901 is stuck with firefox 2.x because ASUS never updates their repositories and most other repositories can cause problems. :(

ubuntu-eee is, in the same way, specifically prepared for the eee's hardware, so I don't think that would work well for you either.

For a graphical launcher, the closest thing you could do for an old laptop would be to get Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

As for speed, one thing you could do would be to build as much as you can from source.

Of course, this defeats the purpose of Ubuntu and .deb packages.

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OK, it's using Xandros.

But my point being - is this Linux showing that it can be a great OS on a limited hardware platform? If so, going to mess with a laptop later.

Which distro is much less important than how it is set up. Which desktop (gnome/kde/opembox/icewm/etc.) makes a big difference. Also which apps are chosen (OpenOffice is nice, but it is huuuuge!) makes a large difference on the resources consumed during operation.

Even things like XOrg can be replaced with a lighter (and less capable/flexible/powerful) Xvesa implementation of the X Window System.

I think that lightweight, low-end computing is where Linux can really shine and become an attractive option for OEMs to use to provide an acceptable performance to the customer at minimal hardware (and no licensing!) costs to themselves.

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EEE use iceWM, it is light, ut not that much. JWM is a better choice if you like win95 style desktop with few color.

About X, the EEE run Xorg, but I don't. I switched to XFBDev (same familly as Xvesa, but load even faster and speed is good (for 2D) if you got an accelerated framebuffer). They are hard to find (and even harder to build correctly) but the KDRIDE (tinyX) familly have quite a few member, like Xvesa, XFBDev, XVia, XNeo and a bunch of other (like 12). They are all fast to start, but XFBDev is the fastest with less than 1/5 of a second.

Personally, with XFBDev and AwesomeWM, my debian (I am a gentoo user, but I didn't have time to compile one on that turtle) load the desktop in 1/3 second after init rc4. I did write an autologgin exec and a dynamic windows manager to work with it. If I want to change WM (to JWM, KDE4 or fluxbox in my care) I can in a grub submenu, and the resolution too (if I plug an external monitor). Config are not persistant when made from grub, but an init script take care to save them.

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OK, so I got my mother an eeepc, and damn it flies. With such low hardware specs it's amazing!

Made me think - I have a few older laptops knocking about - could I do something similar with them?

What variant is the EeePC running? How easy would it be to put something similar - with launcher - on a previous Windows laptop?

You can use Ubuntu with Netbook Remix on your laptop.

https://launchpad.net/netbook-remix

screenshot:

2548177765_c4e10e00fa_o.png

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WOW.

Just put Ubuntu on an old (Pentium 3, 256mb Ram) laptop. It's become a relevant machine again. So far just using Firefox and Pidgin, but that's mostly all my GF does.

Next step - some way to manage her iPod on it :)

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Which distro is much less important than how it is set up. Which desktop (gnome/kde/opembox/icewm/etc.) makes a big difference. Also which apps are chosen (OpenOffice is nice, but it is huuuuge!) makes a large difference on the resources consumed during operation.

Even things like XOrg can be replaced with a lighter (and less capable/flexible/powerful) Xvesa implementation of the X Window System.

I think that lightweight, low-end computing is where Linux can really shine and become an attractive option for OEMs to use to provide an acceptable performance to the customer at minimal hardware (and no licensing!) costs to themselves.

I wonder how DirectFB would run on a device like that, it provides hardware acceleration and such, yet it runs on internet phones.

http://directfb.org/screenshots/directfb_on_tuxscreen.jpg

And low-end computing really is where linux can shine, my router only ever has about 5% CPU usage at any one time, and the only thing on it that isn't "free" is the firmware for the wireless hardware.

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WOW.

Just put Ubuntu on an old (Pentium 3, 256mb Ram) laptop. It's become a relevant machine again. So far just using Firefox and Pidgin, but that's mostly all my GF does.

Next step - some way to manage her iPod on it :)

I don't have an iPod, but I hear that amarok (media player) or gtkpod (specific app for iPods) work.

If you have machines older than that, and you like Ubuntu, I might recommend Xubuntu, which is a Ubuntu foundation but uses the lighter XFCE manager and replaces a few other heavy apps with slightly slimmer versions.

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WOW.

Just put Ubuntu on an old (Pentium 3, 256mb Ram) laptop. It's become a relevant machine again. So far just using Firefox and Pidgin, but that's mostly all my GF does.

Next step - some way to manage her iPod on it :)

Actually, you should try xubuntu (to switch from ubuntu: sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop), it use less ram and look almost the same. About the iPod, just plug it in. If it is not the latest iPod, it will work. If it is, then wait few month (unfortunally), the time for hacker to reverse engineer it. My old iPod 5g worked fine on Ubuntu (with rhytmbox) and Kubuntu (with Amarok) 2 years ago.

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Any further suggestions over RhythmBox? Lack of playlist support is a bit of an issue.

amarok, if you haven't tried it. I know quite a few will disagree with me, but I think Exaile isn't too bad. It's like amarok except based from the ground up on GTK+ instead of Qt. I'm guessing you're using regular Ubuntu, so you'll be using GNOME, which uses GTK+. Maybe it's just me, but I found it faster than amarok (which uses Qt, which is found in KDE, which is standard on Kubuntu)

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PureLegend: Cheers. I'm going to look at that Amarok - it looks a bit more "complete" than Exaile right now. But thanks for your opinions also!

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WOW.

Just put Ubuntu on an old (Pentium 3, 256mb Ram) laptop. It's become a relevant machine again. So far just using Firefox and Pidgin, but that's mostly all my GF does.

Next step - some way to manage her iPod on it :)

Maybe it's just me, but I have a laptop that is similar, if not the same (mine's a Dell Latitude LS with a Pentium III 500mhz and has 256MB RAM as well), and I find XP boots much faster than Linux.

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