My dual core Dell D630 (Lark) decided she wanted a taste of my fresh brewed mint iced tea, not realizing that it was poisonous for her. I had to dig out my Compaq Evo from 2003 and fired him up, to see if he (jake) could still run a few light laps for a few weeks until I found repair parts for Lark. Vista booted up just fine, but I only used that to run Odin for flashing my phone, but it is a heavy load for the old dog, so I decided to try out a light distro. I chose Lubuntu because it was quick and familiar under the skin, from past experience, Lxde is simple and straightforward.
Lubuntu runs like a champ on the old man's P4-M, but that is mostly due to a lack of extra stuff running that Ubuntu and Kubuntu run.
Everything works out of the box, as expected. There is minimal configuring to to, as like most *buntus, the automagic stuff takes care of it all, and my hardware is known and supported. There is no sound mixer included for some reason, but sound works fine ootb, until you add a headset or mic. You can install pulseaudio or alsamixer, but the Lxde sound applet complains that it does not see alsamixer (probably because it is looking for the gui version) or pavucontrol - as pulse is not installed.
I installed Skype and had to play with all the sound devices listed, it seems like there are 5 or more for each device, lol, but I got it where I liked it.
As to reliability, stability, lightness, it is all good in that area. Ole Jake still wanted to shut down if I ran Chromium, the default browser, with too many tabs, Heavy flash usage did the same thing. Wasn't even going to try Gimp or anything heavy on this creaky thing
Also, quite regularly I would loose use of my trackpad, leaving me to reboot to get that back.
Now, this ended up all being hardware and pebkac. I decided to get the dust out of the old man, so I took off the keyboard to get at the exhaust fan, etc to get rid of the fuzz and dust. That's where I found a loose wire on the trackpad's connector. Fixed that, and got a flash of intelligence for once, and decided to string my self-installed, haphazardly arranged wifi antennae outside from directly under the keyboard, so that they hang outside the laptop. I am thinking thagt the radio waves were causing some interference or similar because Jake has not shut down yet, and is running cooler. I am going to run some youtube to see how he fares, but so far so good.
So it is always a good idea to look at non-software things once in a while when there are issues, especially if something has been kludged together
.
Lubuntu runs like a champ on the old man's P4-M, but that is mostly due to a lack of extra stuff running that Ubuntu and Kubuntu run.
Everything works out of the box, as expected. There is minimal configuring to to, as like most *buntus, the automagic stuff takes care of it all, and my hardware is known and supported. There is no sound mixer included for some reason, but sound works fine ootb, until you add a headset or mic. You can install pulseaudio or alsamixer, but the Lxde sound applet complains that it does not see alsamixer (probably because it is looking for the gui version) or pavucontrol - as pulse is not installed.
I installed Skype and had to play with all the sound devices listed, it seems like there are 5 or more for each device, lol, but I got it where I liked it.
As to reliability, stability, lightness, it is all good in that area. Ole Jake still wanted to shut down if I ran Chromium, the default browser, with too many tabs, Heavy flash usage did the same thing. Wasn't even going to try Gimp or anything heavy on this creaky thing
Also, quite regularly I would loose use of my trackpad, leaving me to reboot to get that back. Now, this ended up all being hardware and pebkac. I decided to get the dust out of the old man, so I took off the keyboard to get at the exhaust fan, etc to get rid of the fuzz and dust. That's where I found a loose wire on the trackpad's connector. Fixed that, and got a flash of intelligence for once, and decided to string my self-installed, haphazardly arranged wifi antennae outside from directly under the keyboard, so that they hang outside the laptop. I am thinking thagt the radio waves were causing some interference or similar because Jake has not shut down yet, and is running cooler. I am going to run some youtube to see how he fares, but so far so good.
So it is always a good idea to look at non-software things once in a while when there are issues, especially if something has been kludged together
.
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