Looking for Linux recommendation for older laptop

[smirk]

Hi there, we have an older Compaq N610C laptop that we use for light web browsing, occasional Flash movie, looking up recipes, checking webmail, etc. It's a Pentium 4-M with 512 MB RAM and a slowish hard drive. It seems that over the past couple years it has just been running more and more slowly under XP. Actually, it runs ok, it's just booting up and launching apps that is so slow. I was thinking of wiping it and installing Linux with the hopes that maybe the old lappy would perform better.

Can anyone recommend a good distribution for this machine? I'm fairly technical with computers, new to Linux but comfortable with Windows and the OS X command line. My wife will expect it to "just work". She also loves hibernating it instead of shutting it down so that it will start up faster, not sure if that's an issue under Linux. By the way, will Linux perform better than Windows on the same hardware, or has it become so feature-rich by now that the two OS's are about the same?

This is the laptop: http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/11382_na/11382_na.html.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

 

[lxskllr]

I'd say Puppy for pure speed, and one of the *buntus for features, and a greater likelihood of everything working out of the box. Suspend seems hit and miss in Linux from what I've read. It works great on my Eee900, and terribly on my P4 desktop. My P4 has other issues with Linux though, so I wouldn't expect it to work right. I'd guesstimate the latest Ubuntu is about as fast as XP. In other words you get a brand new, up to date O/S, with the speed of a 10yr old O/S. Puppy will be even quicker.

 

[Sylvanas]

Try the latest Ubuntu on it (9.10, although 10.4 is out next month) and see what you think. From there you can see if you'd like a smaller footprint distribution like puppylinux or perhaps a different one altogether. On older hardware Linux is by far the best way to go. In my experience with older hardware Linux has been snappier than when I had XP on my old machines.

EDIT: Although I do note your lappy has a radeon 7500. ATI's drivers can be hit and miss on Linux so be prepared (although they have come leaps and bounds in the past 2 years).

 

[joetekubi]

I am a BIG fan of debian based distros, and have been using Xubuntu for several years on my main system. Not sure, though, if it would run well in 513MB ram.

I recently worked on installing Linux on an old P3 laptop with 128MB ram.
I found and liked SimplyMEPIS http://www.mepis.org/ but it wouldn't boot in 128M -
I suspect it would run well in 512MB. I ended up successfully installing a lighter variant of Mepis, AntiX http://antix.mepis.org/index.php/Main_Page

Puppy Linux or Damn Small Linux may also be useful. Often with the minimal distros, one may boot and run well, and another not. The hardware detection and initialization scripts are not quite as polished as the large distros.

HTH,
-joe

 

[Paperlantern]

I would also suggest Linux Mint 8 Helena (or wait for 9 due out in May). Its based on Ubuntu, is just as compatible and quick, with a more pleasing theme to it. IMO.

My guess is your XP install is chewing into your 512 most or all the way and you are using virtual memory to launch programs. Most likely the XP install would be fine if you cleaned up startup processes and removed unneeded programs completely. Defrag it and it would prolly be just fine. If you have 512, your target boot up memory usage should be 200ish MB. Which is completely doable in XP.

 

[xSauronx]

My guess is your XP install is chewing into your 512 most or all the way and you are using virtual memory to launch programs. Most likely the XP install would be fine if you cleaned up startup processes and removed unneeded programs completely. Defrag it and it would prolly be just fine. If you have 512, your target boot up memory usage should be 200ish MB. Which is completely doable in XP.

this. that or check fs/t or ebay for some old RAM and give it 1gb

 

[smirk]

Hey guys, thanks for all the ideas. I was mistaken about the memory, I went home and checked and it does have 1 GB RAM. It also has been pruned down and defragged multiple times over the years. I think that it just has a slow hard drive, and that - combined with Windows' propensity for gathering sludge over time - results in a sluggish system.

So last night I did a ton of research based on all of your ideas, and ended up downloading the latest ISOs of Mint and Xubuntu. I installed Mint last night and was pleased with the performance. The ATI driver caused it to freeze multiple times, however, and I finally learned that for it to work all visual effects had to be disabled (I guess this prevents it from trying to use video card hardware acceleration). After that it ran well. I even got the Airnet AWN154 wireless card working with ndiswrapper, which is amazing considering that the company doesn't exist anymore and they never wrote Linux drivers. Mint made it easy. About the only problems I experienced were that system notifications appeared as solid black rectangles (a known bug with the Radeon Mobility 7500) and also a streaming Quicktime movie trailer had a white vertical bar running through it until I dragged another window over it to force it to redraw itself.

Sadly, all the freezes caused some file system corruption. Fsck ran when booting up after the last freeze and found a ton of errors, including something about a lost chain. So this might be a good opportunity to install Xubuntu and see how it compares. I'll post back my findings in the event it can help someone else one day.

Thanks again!

 

[Net]

switch the window manager to fluxbox or something similar

 

[Paperlantern]

That is already good info for me, i'm running Ubuntu 9.10 on this old Dell Latitude 9100 (fitting, no?) and it has a Mobility Radeon 9700 or some such thing, i too could not use hardware accelleration at all, videos chopped to hell, effects chopped, scrolling webpages lagged. Once i turned that off, the eye candy went away, but i was able to use it, and it is VERY fast, but I was thinking about trying Mint instead, but with those issues and ATI, i might hold off until May for Mint 9.

I use Mint 8 at the office side by side with my Main Win7 box. Its installed on a Dual core 2.6GHz with 2GB RAM and an OLD nVidia Geforce MX 4 series. Nvidia driver runs like a dream on it, all effects are fine except a select few chop here and there, but not surprising since the card is 4 some years old. Makes me wish i could try a better card. I love it so far, and with Synergy running on both so i can just hop from one to the other almost as if its the same machine, its pure perfection.

 

[Jodell88]

I would use LXDE as your DE. Its fast and light.

Edit: For the graphics drivers you have to make sure that you are running the open source drivers because the official ATI drivers no longer supports that graphics card.

 

[smirk]

I would use LXDE as your DE. Its fast and light.

Is it much different from xfce? Do you recommend it partially because the LXDE Mint distribution is already out, whereas the xfce version isn't? Or do you think it would be better suited for this hardware?

 

[smirk]

...Once i turned that off, the eye candy went away, but i was able to use it, and it is VERY fast, but I was thinking about trying Mint instead, but with those issues and ATI, i might hold off until May for Mint 9.

Mint is basically Ubuntu, so your experience with Mint with regards to your video card issues will likely be identical. If it's not too much of a pain to reinstall, it might be fun to install Mint and compare it apples to apples (Mint 8 is built on Ubuntu 9.10).

 

[Paperlantern]

Yeah I know, they use Ubuntu as a base for each successive release of Mint, thats why i selected Mint 8 at the office because I already used Ubuntu 9.10 at home. But you are probably right, I would probably have the exact same problems and quirks as i do in U9.10.

Mint 9 is aiming at Ubuntu 10.04 and will likely release with Gnome right out of the gate as other previous Mint releases have. I am eagerly awaiting both Ubuntu 10.04 and Mint 9.

 

[Jodell88]

Is it much different from xfce? Do you recommend it partially because the LXDE Mint distribution is already out, whereas the xfce version isn't? Or do you think it would be better suited for this hardware?

It is even lighter on resources than xfce while still being quite usable.

I'm not sure about the releases of Mint (I use Arch Linux) but it should be in the repo for Mint. You can download and try it.

 

[lxskllr]

I wouldn't get too hung up on the desktop environment, unless you want speed over anything else. I use Gnome, with full effects, and Compiz, and it works fine on all the low end machines I put it on. Even the heavy managers are still pretty light. KDE may be worse, I don't know. I never cared for KDE so I haven't tried it on any of my machines lately.

I'd give them all a try, and see which you like best.

 

[Jodell88]

I wouldn't get too hung up on the desktop environment, unless you want speed over anything else. I use Gnome, with full effects, and Compiz, and it works fine on all the low end machines I put it on. Even the heavy managers are still pretty light. KDE may be worse, I don't know. I never cared for KDE so I haven't tried it on any of my machines lately.

I'd give them all a try, and see which you like best.

I wouldn't be hung up on the DE either. I also agree with trying them all to what you like best. The only problem is with all the DE's and WM's for Linux you start to get overwhelmed

He cannot use desktop effects because he will be using the open source ATI drivers which has little to no 3D support.

 

[Sylvanas]

Makesure you are using the latest ATI open Source driver. Always plenty of info over at http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=home. It's gradually getting more functionality so keep an eye out. A change in desktop environment probably won't help much but it's worth a try if the things freezing all the time.

 

[smirk]

I thought I'd post an update. Well.... it didn't work out so well. I couldn't get the display stable. Things would seem fine until I tried to watch a Quicktime video, and then odd screen artifacts would pop up. Also, launching the activity monitor (forget its actual name, but it's like the graphical version of "top") resulted in the entire window filled in with colored static. The only way to get rid of it was to click in the approximate location of where the close button should be and then it would go away. That was the only app that seemed to do that.

Also, there was something funky with the trackpad driver. It wasn't smooth or steady; it was almost impossible to resize a window because you could never get the cursor steady enough over the edge of a window to click on it. Just touching your finger to the trackpad resulted in the cursor having tremors on the screen, as if it had Parkinsons disease.

I ended up installing Windows 7, which is a little slow but rock solid so far. I really wish Linux had worked out, but either the laptop is too old or just has an unfortunate selection of hardware components. It was a really educational and interesting experience, though, so thanks to all of you for your input.

 

[Paperlantern]

That is unfortunate that Linux didnt work out. I actually ended up blowing away my U9.10 install and installed Mint 8 on my laptop as well. The ATI driver couldnt be happier, it has full support of all the desktop effects (burning windows, genie lamp minimizations, fade, even the desktop space selector that allows you to middle click on the desktop and drag to rotate the 4 desktop spaces around like a 3D cube), and they all look gorgeous, and amazingly run just as smooth if not more so than the 2.6 Dual Core at the office that has a 512MB Nvidia 8400 GS and 2GB of RAM in it. This is against a 64MB card from 2004/5, a non dual core processor, slower bus speed, and half as much RAM. I was floored!

I am officially a Linux Mint Fan!

 

[pradeep1]

I've used Xubuntu on low end machines and it works well: http://www.xubuntu.org/

 

[cheesehead]

Lubuntu is the latest high-efficiency Linux distro, and a 10.04-based distribution should be out shortly. It's supposed to be even faster than Xubuntu.

That said, having used Xubuntu, I can highly recommend it.

 

[xSauronx]

that should run most any current distro fine. the specs are similar to a T40 i had and it ran debian or ubuntu great at the time (probably 3 - 4 years ago). its definitely more powerful than my netbook which can handle ubuntu 9.10 with compiz without issue

kinda surprised you had video issues. the radeon 7500 in my t40 worked great with the open ati drivers...i definitely dont recall having any issues with the laptop. in fact, the only reason i upgraded it to a t60 was because the t60 had a dual core cpu and i wanted to fiddle with VMs some

 

[Skitzer]

I've got an older laptop, Inspiron 4150 with a 2.2Ghz P4, 1GB ram and a 60GB 5400rpm hard drive. Mint 8 runs beautifully on it. All devices were detected and all drivers installed correctly. So much quicker and easier to use than XP Pro. I'll be installing Mint 9 on it in a week or two.

 

[OBLAMA2009]

puppy would run fine but for ubuntu or a derivative like mint you might not have quite enough memory for it to run smoothly. i think ubuntu takes about 400mb for just the os

 

[VinDSL]

I'd say Puppy for pure speed [...]

puppy would run fine [...]

Another vote for Puppy Linux!

There are no bragging rights running a distro named Puppy, but... Puppy is my distro of choice on doorstop computers!

I'm currently using Puppy on 2 machines: An ancient Fujitsu Lifebook lappy (64MB RAM) and an equally ancient eMachine desktop box (160MB RAM). Both of these computers came loaded with Win ME from the factory, and date from the last century.

I tried all of the 'usual suspects' on the Fujitsu lappy, and Puppy was only distro that gave acceptable performance. 64MB RAM isn't enough memory to run any decent modern OS -- except Puppy.

The eMachine desktop (that a friend donated to me - in pristine condition) has a lot of proprietary hardware. I couldn't get ANY Linux distro to install (none made it past the first boot) except Puppy. The only hardware that didn't work with Puppy was an oddball 3rd party ethernet card that my friend had installed. I tossed an old Netgear card in there, and away it went.

Anyway, I've never found anything better than Puppy, on 'classic' machines...

EDIT

BTW, I should mention...

If you have enough RAM installed, Puppy will run in entirely in memory, making it hideously fast (no kidding)!