Sunday, July 26, 2009

Linux on an old Laptop

I promised to fix a friends old laptop.  I thought I would install a minimal desktop based on ubuntu.  But ubuntu does not boot on this machine as it turned out.  This also happened the first time I tried linux, ubuntu could not handle the old test laptop. That time I installed Suse without any problem.
I don't like Suse much and I did some digging around. I considered Fedora since I think redhat is probably still the best choice for servers(?) and it would hurt to learn it. 
Final decision to give debian a chance since don't really have time to Fedora right now. 
It worked without any problem! I think the debian installation process looks much better than Ubuntu and obviously it can handle old HW better.

I made a test installation with command line only and manually added Xfce & GDM. Had some intial problems but nothing much.

I also found out that there is a debian CD with lxde /xfce and  I loaded lxde onto the laptop but I didn't like it much. After some google I decided to stick with a minimal xfce on top of debian.

Plan now is to load the xdebian into a virtal machine and use it as a reference when building the mini desktop.

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