Trusty installs beautifully on 10 year old laptop!

[GreyGeek]

I friend gave me his old 17" Gateway m675 laptop, sans battery, which he purchased in 2004.
I put Kubuntu 14.04 on it and used b43legacy on the BMC4603 wireless.
The install selected the Radeon driver for the video chip and Stellarium gives me 30 fps.
Everything works. For a single core Pentium 4 device it runs remarkely fast and well.

[Silent Observer]

Nice. I'm tempted to try a Live USB of Lubuntu on my 1997 vintage Pentium II laptop; it's currently running very well on antiX 13.2/Fluxbox, but it's within the hardware spec for Lubuntu, as I recall. Runs a good bit better with antiX than it did on Win98 when it was new; that might well be true of Lubuntu, as well.

[NickStone]

It would run even better using a lighter desktop or window manager.

[GreyGeek]

I realized that the Gateway m675 has a single pentium core but also includes a hyperthread core, so it appears to the 32 bit Trusty as a dual core..

As I type I am installing Xubuntu 14.04 on a 12 year old Gateway laptop (from the same fellow, which he gave to his daughter when it was new). It, too, is a Pentium 4 but it has only 512Kb of RAM. It also has a Radeon video chip AND a 3.5" floppy disk port, plus a dual PCI port! (Into which a DLink DWL-G650 wlan card is inserted) It's build like a rock. The keys on the keyboard look unused. There is no wear on the bezel top where one puts his/her hand heels when typing. However, I do hear an occasional HD whine, which might indicate bearing going out.

I think Xubuntu may be pushing the envelope on this one ...

EDIT: 30 minutes later -- Installation complete, spent some time playing around. Xubuntu 14.04 IS useful on a 12 year old Gateway laptop. Accepted defaults on all installation parameters. After reboot, apps start reasonably quickly from the 20GB HD with a 1GB swap file. One BIG don't do: run two or more apps at the same time. I started the Ubuntu updater and while it was working I fired up a terminal. The updater complained aborted with "not enough resources" or something like that.
Fired up FireFox and browsed YouTube and watched some videos with no problems.

Bottom line: Kubuntu Trusty works great on the 10 year old Gateway with 1GB of RAM and 50GB HD. Xubuntu Trusty works acceptably on the 12 year old Gateway.

Both laptops would be acceptable for browsing the Internet, doing email, and writing documents.

[whatthefunk]

I have a 12 year old Sony Vaio running Crunchbang. Runs brilliantly. I used to have Lubuntu on it, but it was a little slow and I couldnt have more than one program open at a time. Installing Crunchbang solved that. I can now have up to three programs open before I start running into problems.

[GreyGeek]

Thanks, whatthefunk! I'm going to dl crunchbang and install it on that 12 year old Gateway.

[whatthefunk]

If you dont like the default panel in Crunchbang, tint2, Id recommend installing lxpanel. It gives a bit more functionality but is still very good with resources.

[SteveRiley]

I think Xubuntu may be pushing the envelope on this one ...

XFCE isn't exactly a lightweight DE anymore. And I am having some serious doubts about XFCE's future. It's been over two years since their last release. Is it still alive?

[NickStone]

XFCE isn't exactly a lightweight DE anymore. And I am having some serious doubts about XFCE's future. It's been over two years since their last release. Is it still alive?

Yes XFCE is still alive, it's just that it's developers doesn't feel the need to release a new version every so many months like the developers of Gnome and KDE. The current development version of XFCE is 4.11 which once has been classed as stable will be released as 4.12.

XFCE is released approx. every 2 or 3 years.

[GreyGeek]

The Crunchbang installation steps are unique, and if something goes wrong it is one which only a seasoned Linux veteran can navigate through. However, it has all the tools necessary for those who understand the various steps of the installation process. What it doesn't have, and what gave me some considerable trouble, is some proprietary files.

Crunchbang said the 12 year old gateway required the Maestro3 sound drivers, which were not on the install CD because they are proprietary. In the middle of the install, just before disk partitioning, it asked me to insert a USB (or CDROM) with "ess/maestro3_assp_kernel.fw" on it. New or unseasoned Linux users would not recognize that "ess/" means that the fw file had to be in a directory off the main directory labelled "ess" on the USB stick.

Locating that file was difficult. Most of the 8,000+ listings were not the actual file but a text listing of installation files for various versions of the Linux kernel. Having found and downloaded that file I copied it to a USB stick under the ess directory, which I had to create. Insert the USB stick in the 12 yr old Gateway and Reboot. Opps! Now is says I need "ess/maestro3_assp_minisrc.fw". Having searched for the other one, this one was easier to find. Turn off the Gateway. Unplug the USB stick from the Gateway and plug it into my Acer. Add the minisrc.fw file to the ess directory on the USB stick. Unmount the USB stick, remove it and plug it into the Gateway. Reboot. The installer appears to accept the files and continues without asking me to remove the USB stick. When the installation program gets to the disk partitioning section it offers both the HD and the USB stick. It seems confused about where the MBR should go, and the boot flag on the HD partiton was not set. Yank the USB stick (no umount option available) and back up in the installation process to the "Partition disk" step. Now things are normal. Proceed with the installation, which appears to finish without additional problems. Reboot. Log in.

The Crunchbank desktop is the most unique I've seen. It is a very dark gray. It has a narrow panel at the top, similar to GNOME. Most of it is taken up with two virtual desktops. Crowded against the right side of the panel are an Internet connection icon, a battery icon, a clipboard icon, a speaker icon and a digital clock. On the dark gray desktop is a conky like display divided into two sections. The top section is called "System Info" and contains the host name, Uptime, RAM (varying size/502MiB), swap usage (and it is being used -- first time I've seen that in years), disk usage and CPU usage. The bottom section is a list of hot keys active from the desktop. Many of the classics are there, like Alt+F2 and Prtsc, but the rest are "Super+somekey", like "Super+w" to fire the web browser. One can also right mouse to get a menu listing of options, just like GNOME. When an app is opened its icon representation in the panel has color in it. A terminal, although gray and white on the desktop, is represented by an icon frame with four red buttons in it, in the first virtual desktop panel.

On the first login one is presented with a "Welcome" terminal message, which offers to install additional software for printing, Java, updates, and sundry other things. I accepted the default on all prompts, including installing LibreOffice. What good is a laptop if you can't write documents? At the end it offered the opportunity to install development tools, version control software, the LAMP stack and the debian packaging tools. I declined all of them. The user I give this too won't know how to use those tools, and if he or she does, they'll know how to install them from the repository.

Unlike KDE 4.13.1 running on the 12 yr old Gateway, Crunchbang is fast enough to allow more than one app to run at the same time on the desktop without lagging the mouse. It is certainly an excellent choice for a Pentium 4 box, even if it has hyper-threading. While the desktop is light, the main Linux system underneath Crunchbang is Debian's Wheezy, so it has a great engine driving the works.

Crunchbang is MUCH faster on the Gateway than Kubuntu 14.04.1, as one would suspect for a light DM. While functional, it lacks a LOT of the power of KDE 4.13.1, but on that 12 year old box it is much faster than XP, which was on it before.

I had hoped to hear a sign-on musical theme when the desktop completed displaying, but I didn't, so I don't know if the maestro3 firmware I found was the right one. In the search I found versions of it for about every kernel release version, and every package option. Normally, one would download the alsa installation tar package, untar it, and use make & make install to generate the snd_maestro3.ko kernel objects. While the installation program accepted the files, and during the first book I saw the installation of alsa listed without errors, no sound on display of the desktop is not a good sign. However, I fired up the weasel web browser, went to youtube, and played some videos. The sound was great!

EDIT: Running weasel and playing a youtube video uses 90% of the CPU, +-5%. The RAM usage is at 254MiB/502MiB. Swap usage is 3.4MiB/824MiB. The installation itself took 3.33GiB/17.5GiB.

[SteveRiley]

The Crunchbank desktop is the most unique I've seen.

It's Openbox, a completely different window manager than what you're used to. Have fun!

[GreyGeek]

Here is what the Crunchbang 11 desktop looks like on that 12 year old Gateway:

For an i486 Pentium 4 this OS gives surprising speed. You can see the preconfigured conky stuff on the left right side. Crunchbang doesn't come with all the pretty wallpaper that is often shown.

Actually, I like that interface a lot.

[SteveRiley]

Openbox is only a window manager, not a complete desktop environment. Imagine running only KWin without the rest of KDE.

[whatthefunk]

Its very simple, but for an older computer thats what you want. No sense in eating up limited resources with eye candy.

[GreyGeek]

Exactly, whatthefunk, especially when avoiding the eye candy significantly increases the speed of the system.