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rcjordan
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« on: December 03, 2009, 11:09:21 AM » |
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If you have a netbook that's too underpowered for Win and/or FF3, try easy peasy. It's salvaged 2 of my oldest, lowest powered netbooks. You may need to configure the bios to enable wi-fi and any cameras onboard, at least for Asus it disables them by default. http://www.geteasypeasy.com/ |
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perkiset
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« Reply #1 on: December 03, 2009, 12:16:19 PM » |
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Nice. I have a few notebooks laying about that are just this side of useless... I'll give it a shot.
Cheers RC
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It is now believed, that after having lived in one compound with 3 wives and never leaving the house for 5 years, Bin Laden called the U.S. Navy Seals himself.
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rcjordan
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« Reply #2 on: December 03, 2009, 12:35:52 PM » |
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This past summer I bought a new Asus 900 16gb SSD model with XP for $199. Apparently, reading through the forums, Asus made a bad choice in the type of ssd (some sort of write problem) and the general consensus was that it wasn't much better than a brick. I can confirm that it was dog-slow from the git-go and FF3's penchant for hammering the drive compounded the problem. I tried tweaking XP and FF, but it just wasn't going to cut it.
I'd already installed easy peasy (EP) on the first netbook Asus developed, the 701 4g harddrive and, after testing it over the Thanksgiving weekend, it did well. Speedy enough to use to read the news and check gmail. Mostly, I wanted to check how it handled wi-fi networks while on the go. No problems.
Anyway, I made a few more attempts at optimizing XP on the SSD model and it still sucked. So I installed EP and tested it out this morning. FF3 is plenty fast enough on this machine now. Boot time is about 70 seconds.
Once you're in, the Preferences and Administration panels are similar enough to Win's Control Panel that even a linux novice like me can tweak the default install.
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vsloathe
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« Reply #3 on: December 04, 2009, 08:52:51 AM » |
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Linux being difficult is just a canard. Chances are your car, your fridge, your toaster, and your TV (Tivo!) run Linux.
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hai
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nutballs
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« Reply #4 on: December 04, 2009, 09:44:57 AM » |
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so its a stripped down ubuntu?
gonna try this for my mom's, soon to be netbook from a laptop.
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I could eat a bowl of Alphabet Soup and shit a better argument than that.
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rcjordan
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« Reply #5 on: December 04, 2009, 09:58:51 AM » |
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>so its a stripped down ubuntu?
Yeah. EP comes premixed for most of the netbooks, so my question about using it for old laptops would be how to find drivers and such? I know jackshit about BIOS and all that. On the Asus I just did what others posted in the netbook forums to get the wi-fi and camera enabled. That said, we all know linux has been salvaging old, underpowered desktops for years now so I expect it to work on old x86 laptops if you can somehow get it to recognize the hardware.
>mom
What I like is that the admin can fairly easily customize the desktop so general users won't see all the accessories and apps.
I need a sacrificial laptop for friends and family to use over the holidays, so I have just about everything unticked.
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perkiset
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« Reply #6 on: December 04, 2009, 10:50:25 AM » |
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Linux being difficult is just a canard. Chances are your car, your fridge, your toaster, and your TV (Tivo!) run Linux.
Correct, Linux being difficult is a canard because users don't, for the most part, interact with it. They interact with Gnome or KDE and then try to update settings in a complicated OS. Using a Linux machine is not difficult, until there is a problem. It's when a user can't figure out how to fix something that it becomes untenable. |
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It is now believed, that after having lived in one compound with 3 wives and never leaving the house for 5 years, Bin Laden called the U.S. Navy Seals himself.
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rcjordan
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« Reply #7 on: December 04, 2009, 11:13:23 AM » |
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>They interact with Gnome or KDE and then try to update settings in a complicated OS. Using a Linux machine is not difficult, until there is a problem.
That's why I dumped xandros. Even simple stuff like deleting icons from the desktop took a half-day of researching the forums. So far, this EP is at least fathomable, though far from intuitive. At least it has an admin UI that is checkbox driven and I knew enough not to uncheck any app that had "gnome" or "daemon" in the title or there might be trouble. And when I started removing some of the primary apps (like evolution mail/calendar) there were alert boxes to warn me of dependencies by other apps, so that was good.
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nutballs
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« Reply #8 on: December 04, 2009, 11:56:02 AM » |
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i have been playing with chromeos. It does what my mom would need a laptop to do, which is basically netbook stuff.
less than alpha though is not reasonable for her.
But it did detect the wifi with no trouble, so thats a +.
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I could eat a bowl of Alphabet Soup and shit a better argument than that.
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