Some time ago, I was given some old Dell laptops. Out of three I managed to get one going and put Ubuntu Linux on it. It was in June and I grabbed it to go to the Apostolic Summit to give it a test run to see if it was any good as a portable device.
I discovered it was as slow as anything, and when we tried to connect it to the internet it just wouldn't connect. Under the pressure of being at a conference, it was too hard to think straight while I was away, and I'm not familiar enough with Ubuntu to have things click in my head. Yesterday I thought about the issue, and realised I needed to sort out the network connection and it took about a minute to find the internet and get going.
I spent a few hours yesterday tweaking the laptop and I managed to get a good system out of it.
One of the frustrations I found was using synaptic to update and/or install was slower than a wet week then I remembered the console and good old apt-get :) "apt-get install" followed by package name just solved all the dependency issues straight off.
Firstly I installed the Xfce4 window system and got rid of gnome. I like gnome, but on this machine, it just uses far too much RAM.
I also installed Abiword to use in preference to Open Office.
I was going to use Epiphany, thinking it might be faster than Firefox- it took over a minute to start Epiphany, compared with 30 seconds for Firefox. i haven't tried Opera yet, but I might just give it a go- if it's no slower than FF it would definitely be my preferred browser.
Sylpheed was the clear preference for light-weight email client.
So now I'm ready for my trip to Myanmar and India in October. Just need to sort out the minor issues such as visas and vaccinations. :ko:
Keith
I put Opera on the laptop and discovered that it seems to load faster than firefox. Now it is sweet.I had it running for a couple of hours before the battery light started flashing, so it may well be quite useful for my modest needs.I've ordered a MSI CB54G2 Wireless network card, mainly on Tim's recommendation. He has one and reckons it works well under linux. The price was good at $39.One day soon I'll be able to join the collection of nerd who sit in our lounge room with their laptops, connected to the internet and simultaneously listening to loud music. Hmmm... maybe not :-)
ReplyDeleteI've just found your site whilst doing a search for the MSI CB54G2 network card. How have you got on with it? Also, did you know that there is a Christian version of Ubuntu? It can be found at http://www.christianubuntu.com/.Andy
ReplyDeleteI found out that the MSI network card is no longer available :-(I obught a Netgear card instead but I haven't got it going yet with ndiswrapper. The ndiswrapper system finds the card and the drivers OK but it doesn't show up on the configure network dialog. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I put a post on the Ubuntu forum but didn't get a response yet.Yes I've heard of christian Unbuntu which is an interesting concept. It seems that there are all kinds of subsets of Ubuntu out there!
ReplyDelete