Kubuntu Precise on an 8 year old laptop
My 11 year old grandson has a birthday coming up. I gave him my Gateway mp675rr 18" laptop (Pentium 4 with a hyperthread, making it look like a dual core) about four years ago, when I retired and bought my Sony VAIO laptop. His mom (my daughter) dictated that it would be set to boot to XP so she or his dad could "support" it. About a year ago it got so clogged with "stuff" that it took about 10 minutes to boot and it took me half a day to get it back to its normal 3 minute boot up time. A couple weeks ago we tried to play Minecraft together via a server the old gateway couldn't pull it off. So, I swapped him his Gateway for the Acer I bought in January of this year for a birthday present (in addition to the 26" LCD TV for his bedroom! 
). He's a happy camper now!
This morning I put a 32b Kubuntu Precise CD into the drive and booted it up.
The first task was to plug in the eth cable for a permanent connection during the install.
The second task was to use the partition manager to blow XP off the driver, reformat it, and create two partitions: one of 54GB for "/" and one of 1GB for swap.
The third task was the install, with 3rd party installs and updates included.
Thirty minutes later the install was done.
The Radeon driver gave me desktop effects and 3D. Stellarium gave a respectable 30 fps.
I checked the NetworkManager and noticed that the Broadcom 4306 wasn't active. I installed the b43-fwcutter-installer app and it brought down everything needed for a wireless connection. I connected to my wifi router and pulled the eth cable out.
Everything works. The only negatives: there are four vertical lines distracting from the display, and the letters on several keys are rubbed off. My grandson is a touch typist (already! and in the 5th grade!) so he never noticed once his pointing fingers found the home keys. Also, the battery's charge no longer lasts the two hours it used to last.
Kubuntu appears to be working about twice as fast as XP did on it.
It wouldn't work as a server on Minecraft, nor would it work in multiplayer mode. It worked in single user mode OK. Now, under Kubuntu, I am going to see if I can get it to work as a minecraft server.
). He's a happy camper now!This morning I put a 32b Kubuntu Precise CD into the drive and booted it up.
The first task was to plug in the eth cable for a permanent connection during the install.
The second task was to use the partition manager to blow XP off the driver, reformat it, and create two partitions: one of 54GB for "/" and one of 1GB for swap.
The third task was the install, with 3rd party installs and updates included.
Thirty minutes later the install was done.
The Radeon driver gave me desktop effects and 3D. Stellarium gave a respectable 30 fps.
I checked the NetworkManager and noticed that the Broadcom 4306 wasn't active. I installed the b43-fwcutter-installer app and it brought down everything needed for a wireless connection. I connected to my wifi router and pulled the eth cable out.
Everything works. The only negatives: there are four vertical lines distracting from the display, and the letters on several keys are rubbed off. My grandson is a touch typist (already! and in the 5th grade!) so he never noticed once his pointing fingers found the home keys. Also, the battery's charge no longer lasts the two hours it used to last.
Kubuntu appears to be working about twice as fast as XP did on it.
It wouldn't work as a server on Minecraft, nor would it work in multiplayer mode. It worked in single user mode OK. Now, under Kubuntu, I am going to see if I can get it to work as a minecraft server.
(no kmail, no heavy flash, etc)
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