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    #1

    Suggest Net/Notebook OS

    Hello everyone.

    I have a friend for whom I installed a dual boot with Mint KDE and Kubuntu on a old Dell he had laying in the closet.When reinstalled, it worked like a charm, it really is a nice piece of hardware. He seem to enjoy it, both Mint and Kubuntu (he's a complete computer illiterate, I was horrified to learn that he actually used iE as browser before - so I would say that it's fair to consider him "grandmother-mode-user"). He's use will be the usual, surf-mail-spotify-banking

    Anyway, he also got a Notebook - Packard Bell Dot ZG6, with a Atom CPU, 1 GB memory, 8.9" scree & 160 GB HDD, which I'm about to install something similar on.

    I have no notebook/netbook, so my experience with these are slim, some years ago I fixed a friends Acer one with Ubuntu but that's about all my experience with these kind of hardware.
    On this PB machine I installed a partition with Mint KDE again, but I'm not convinced as it didn't run so smooth as I hoped it would. I'd like to promote KDE as much as possible, but I also want to give some diversity/variety in his Linux experience. My initial hope was to set it up so it would be easy to switch between the KDE desktop & notebook mode. Alas, Mint had some nasty freezing issues when switching to notebook mode (obviously something I don't want to promote)

    To make a long story short, what would you here at KFN recommend for a notebook that is to be used by a novice linux user?

    b.r

    Jonas
    ASUS M4A87TD | AMD Ph II x6 | 12 GB ram | MSI GeForce GTX 560 Ti (448 Cuda cores)
    Kubuntu 12.04 KDE 4.9.x (x86_64) - Debian "Squeeze" KDE 4.(5x) (x86_64)
    Acer TimelineX 4820 TG | intel i3 | 4 GB ram| ATI Radeon HD 5600
    Kubuntu 12.10 KDE 4.10 (x86_64) - OpenSUSE 12.3 KDE 4.10 (x86_64)
    - Officially free from windoze since 11 dec 2009
    >>>>>>>>>>>> Support KFN <<<<<<<<<<<<<
    Tags: None
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    #2
    Try Bodhi. Very lightweight, (semi) rolling releaseand is based on ubuntu lts

    Bodhi linux
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      #3
      Originally posted by NickStone View Post
      Try Bodhi. Very lightweight, (semi) rolling releaseand is based on ubuntu lts

      Bodhi linux
      Damn you beat me to it! Yeah Bodhi is great on older hardware. I feel bad though because the guy has got an Atom CPU which is just awful in every context.
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        #4
        Bodhi runs great on my Atom based HP Mini 110

        Please Read Me
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          #5
          Originally posted by Jonas View Post
          Anyway, he also got a Notebook - Packard Bell Dot ZG6, with a Atom CPU, 1 GB memory, 8.9" scree & 160 GB HDD, which I'm about to install something similar on.
          I have a Samsung N130 with similar specifications.

          Kubuntu 12.10 was a big disappointment as it was too slow to be usable.

          I also tried Ubuntu with a fair amount of success. Despite it's, looks Unity is not made for net-books. Many of the dialogs are not resizeable and are too big for a netbook screen. Even the Unity short-cut help page is suppressed as it won't fit! Gnome Shell was also too slow to be of much use.

          Anyway, I've been a happy Lubuntu user for quite a while now. Everything just works. Even LibreOffice runs smoothly although the small screen limits what you can do. And with a Windows style start menu, finding things is very easy for anyone that also uses Windows.

          I'll be upgrading it to Lubuntu 13.04 in due course.
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            #6
            i use kubuntu on my netbook i just used the desktop interface and make the panel and borders thinner to use screeen space. i have a atom 1.6Ghz w/ 2 Gb ram and intel i915 gfx. 10.1" screen. kde 4.10 on raring is running even better then before.
            Mark Your Solved Issues [SOLVED]
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              #7
              I have a 10 year old Fujitsu laptop with Pentium 4 and 768Meg Ram. It runs great with Lubuntu, XUbuntu but not KDE.

              I have Arch working on another partition and Lubuntu 13.04 will release soon so I decided to play with Lubuntu. Added kde-full to Lubuntu. Still using the LXDE most of the KDE apps I've tried work fine with a few anomalys. Wouldn't recommend this for a friends or clients computer. You may try a few apps that he likes and verify functionality before handing it back to him.


              “It is fun to have fun but you have to know how.”
              ― Dr. Seuss

              Ken.
              Opinions are like rear-ends, everybody has one. Here's mine. (|)
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                #8
                Originally posted by lcorken View Post
                I have a 10 year old Fujitsu laptop with Pentium 4 and 768Meg Ram. It runs great with Lubuntu, XUbuntu but not KDE.

                I have Arch working on another partition and Lubuntu 13.04 will release soon so I decided to play with Lubuntu. Added kde-full to Lubuntu. Still using the LXDE most of the KDE apps I've tried work fine with a few anomalys. Wouldn't recommend this for a friends or clients computer. You may try a few apps that he likes and verify functionality before handing it back to him.


                “It is fun to have fun but you have to know how.”
                ― Dr. Seuss

                Ken.
                Pentium! Does that even support PAE?
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                  #9
                  Pentium! Does that even support PAE?
                  I think the Pentium M has the problem. This one is not the M.

                  -Processor-
                  Name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz
                  Family, model, stepping : 15, 2, 9 (Pentium 4)
                  Vendor : Intel

                  Not sure what all that stuff is but here is the Kernel that is now running on Lubuntu 12.10 with this oldy.

                  ken@duck:~$ uname -a
                  Linux duck 3.5.0-26-generic #42-Ubuntu SMP Fri Mar 8 23:20:06 UTC 2013 i686 i686 i686 GNU/Linux

                  Ken.
                  Opinions are like rear-ends, everybody has one. Here's mine. (|)
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                    #10
                    Originally posted by lcorken View Post
                    I think the Pentium M has the problem. This one is not the M.

                    -Processor-
                    Name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz
                    Family, model, stepping : 15, 2, 9 (Pentium 4)
                    Vendor : Intel

                    Not sure what all that stuff is but here is the Kernel that is now running on Lubuntu 12.10 with this oldy.

                    ken@duck:~$ uname -a
                    Linux duck 3.5.0-26-generic #42-Ubuntu SMP Fri Mar 8 23:20:06 UTC 2013 i686 i686 i686 GNU/Linux

                    Ken.
                    An easy check is
                    Code:
                    cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep -c pae
                    If the value is not zero then you have PAE
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                      #11
                      ken@duck:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep -c pae
                      1
                      ken@duck:~$
                      1 is not zero
                      Opinions are like rear-ends, everybody has one. Here's mine. (|)
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                        #12
                        Originally posted by lcorken View Post
                        ken@duck:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep -c pae
                        1
                        ken@duck:~$
                        1 is not zero
                        Lucky you. I know that people have recently been discovering that they don't have PAE and struggling to install the latest *buntu.
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                          #13
                          Originally posted by dmeyer View Post
                          Lucky you. I know that people have recently been discovering that they don't have PAE and struggling to install the latest *buntu.
                          Yea, it runs kinda warm and makes a lot of fan noise but keeps going, as long as it's plugged in. Battery only lasts about 15 minutes now.
                          Opinions are like rear-ends, everybody has one. Here's mine. (|)
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                            #14
                            Originally posted by lcorken View Post
                            Yea, it runs kinda warm and makes a lot of fan noise but keeps going, as long as it's plugged in. Battery only lasts about 15 minutes now.
                            I can only imagine. Such an old, inefficient architecture on a large manufacturing process. Oh well Pentium was great in its day and Linux is great for such old computers.
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                              #15
                              Originally posted by lcorken View Post
                              Linux duck
                              You'll make the penguin jealous, you know.
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