Hi all....
In case anyone is interested, I am in the midst of performing a Lubuntu install on an older computer for a friend of mine and thought I would offer some initial observations of the OS. I'm installing on a whitebox I built four years ago that has a ASUS CUSL2-C motherboard, (Pentium III, 866 mhz,) 512 MB's of memory, a Nvidia GeForce 3 Ti 500 (64 MB's memory,) an ESS (ES1978) Maestro 2E sound card and a Seagate 40 GB hard drive. I first tried installing Ubuntu 10.04 on it but.....well, let's just say that didn't go too well.
It had Windows XP on it beforehand but I wiped it due to licensing requirements.
I found Lubuntu after searching for some names of lightweight distros before getting the system to work on. Burned it to a CD-RW and off we went....
The positives...
1. The Lubuntu installer is unique in that it offers to download and install some codecs and plugins for you (like flash, Windows media player plugin, Realplayer, Quicktime, etc,) so that most everything is ready to go when you begin your first browsing session upon installation. Also different, was that the installer asked you for the typical user information during the install, not before it. Interesting.
2. It is indeed lightweight. It runs well on this system.
3. The Windows manager, OpenBox (or LXDE) does the job. It hasn't locked up once with anything I've ran.
The negatives...
1. Definitely a no frills set up! Very basic (kind of like Windows 9x) look and feel with no eye candy. I'm used to the yummies I have on my system so when I first installed Lubuntu, I didn't care for it at all and it took some time for me to get used to it. This lead to...
2. To remedy this "problem," I tried installing Compiz, which did one thing but not another. What it did do was take away the top window bar with the three buttons to minimize, maximize and close. Not knowing what to do, even after researching the difficulty, led me to reinstall the OS two different times to correct the problem. What it didn't do was to save itself as the default windows manager so every time I would boot the system, it would revert back to OpenBox. I began to research this as well but soon after that point, the first problem made it NOT worth the effort. Too bad too, as Compiz definately spruced things up with no real increase in resource use and decrease in performance.
3. OpenBox (or LXDE) is not rich in options. As an example, there were only two checkboxes relating to sound that I could find and if there are any system sounds in Lubuntu, they're not working on this system, although everything else sound wise works fine, such as browser videos, DVD's, etc.
Also, I tried installing the Linuxant modem driver which for some reason had failed (and I didn't understand the log to even begin to try and ascertain the reason.) Might have to use an external hardware modem if she decides to go with dial-up. Hardware detection and installation went without a hitch, although Jockey did not offer to install the full Nvidia driver for the graphics card, instead, it offered some small experimental 3D driver (which does work, although it won't handle the more intense 3D games.)
Overall, though, I am finding Lubuntu a nice, workable balance between a minimalistic OS like Puppy Linux and "full featured" ones like Ubuntu, Kubuntu or Red Hat, as examples.
EDIT: I just recently installed version 12.10 on a Pentium 4 laptop and was impressed! As far as its appearance goes, this distro has matured greatly! The only glitch I encountered was when I attempted to install Jockey-gtk, which could have been something I contributed to. The OS would say it was installed but when I would go to actually use it, I was told that it was not present and that I should install it.
It found all the devices and loaded the appropriate drivers, except that I had to manually install the drivers for the Broadcom wireless chipset and edit a configuration file in order for it to work.
I did find it a tiny bit too heavy for the laptop but not enough to adversely affect performance so I would not recommend anything less than a Pentium 4, 512 MB's of memory for this version.
Regards...
In case anyone is interested, I am in the midst of performing a Lubuntu install on an older computer for a friend of mine and thought I would offer some initial observations of the OS. I'm installing on a whitebox I built four years ago that has a ASUS CUSL2-C motherboard, (Pentium III, 866 mhz,) 512 MB's of memory, a Nvidia GeForce 3 Ti 500 (64 MB's memory,) an ESS (ES1978) Maestro 2E sound card and a Seagate 40 GB hard drive. I first tried installing Ubuntu 10.04 on it but.....well, let's just say that didn't go too well.
It had Windows XP on it beforehand but I wiped it due to licensing requirements.I found Lubuntu after searching for some names of lightweight distros before getting the system to work on. Burned it to a CD-RW and off we went....
The positives...
1. The Lubuntu installer is unique in that it offers to download and install some codecs and plugins for you (like flash, Windows media player plugin, Realplayer, Quicktime, etc,) so that most everything is ready to go when you begin your first browsing session upon installation. Also different, was that the installer asked you for the typical user information during the install, not before it. Interesting.
2. It is indeed lightweight. It runs well on this system.
3. The Windows manager, OpenBox (or LXDE) does the job. It hasn't locked up once with anything I've ran.
The negatives...
1. Definitely a no frills set up! Very basic (kind of like Windows 9x) look and feel with no eye candy. I'm used to the yummies I have on my system so when I first installed Lubuntu, I didn't care for it at all and it took some time for me to get used to it. This lead to...
2. To remedy this "problem," I tried installing Compiz, which did one thing but not another. What it did do was take away the top window bar with the three buttons to minimize, maximize and close. Not knowing what to do, even after researching the difficulty, led me to reinstall the OS two different times to correct the problem. What it didn't do was to save itself as the default windows manager so every time I would boot the system, it would revert back to OpenBox. I began to research this as well but soon after that point, the first problem made it NOT worth the effort. Too bad too, as Compiz definately spruced things up with no real increase in resource use and decrease in performance.
3. OpenBox (or LXDE) is not rich in options. As an example, there were only two checkboxes relating to sound that I could find and if there are any system sounds in Lubuntu, they're not working on this system, although everything else sound wise works fine, such as browser videos, DVD's, etc.
Also, I tried installing the Linuxant modem driver which for some reason had failed (and I didn't understand the log to even begin to try and ascertain the reason.) Might have to use an external hardware modem if she decides to go with dial-up. Hardware detection and installation went without a hitch, although Jockey did not offer to install the full Nvidia driver for the graphics card, instead, it offered some small experimental 3D driver (which does work, although it won't handle the more intense 3D games.)
Overall, though, I am finding Lubuntu a nice, workable balance between a minimalistic OS like Puppy Linux and "full featured" ones like Ubuntu, Kubuntu or Red Hat, as examples.
EDIT: I just recently installed version 12.10 on a Pentium 4 laptop and was impressed! As far as its appearance goes, this distro has matured greatly! The only glitch I encountered was when I attempted to install Jockey-gtk, which could have been something I contributed to. The OS would say it was installed but when I would go to actually use it, I was told that it was not present and that I should install it.
It found all the devices and loaded the appropriate drivers, except that I had to manually install the drivers for the Broadcom wireless chipset and edit a configuration file in order for it to work.
I did find it a tiny bit too heavy for the laptop but not enough to adversely affect performance so I would not recommend anything less than a Pentium 4, 512 MB's of memory for this version.
Regards...
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