Slow Old Computer in Ubuntu 9.04

You may want to consider running Xubuntu, a variant of Ubuntu that uses the Xfce desktop environment. It's designed to run better on older hardware. I've heard of it running on 200Mhz processors no trouble, so you shouldn't have any problems.

Gabe (And others),

Thanks

Several Questions

1. How do I get Xubuntu and will I have to uninstall Ubuntu and install it like I did Ubuntu. (No great loss, except for my time and a CD disk)

2. Do I still have a Word Processor and Spreadsheet program that can still access and work with files that I have done at work or on other home computers running MS Office.

3. What does it have for Internet? If it is Firefox, will it be a lot faster in this environment?

4. Are there things that I can do in Ubuntu that can speed it up without going to Xubuntu?

.

Hi :)

Xubuntu is available from here
http://www.xubuntu.org/get

But if you already have a working Ubuntu then you might prefer to just install a much lighter-weight Desktop Environment such as Xfce as used by Xubuntu or LxDE. Also Xubuntu uses "Thunar" file-browser instead of "Nautilus". It might be worth getting an even lighter weight Window-Manager than the standard one in Xfce, something like IceWM, OpenBox or even something ultra-light such as pekWM.

Having just tried Xubuntu i would recommend going with installing Xubuntu to replace your Ubuntu rather than trying out all these different things just yet. Xubuntu themes them all quite nicely and puts it together well.

Xubuntu has AbiWord and Gnumeric as standard wordprocessor & spreadsheet but i would install OpenOffice into Xubuntu because it's easier to set the defaults to save in the very unsafe Microsquish formats that people still seem to prefer even nowadays. AbiWord and Gnumeric are excellent but they tend to default to saving everything as "odt" which is a much safer format than ".doc" and ".xls" but Microsquish Office users still can't read "odt" even tho everyone else can. Using "Save As ... " and then just replacing the ending with the appropriate one is easy enough on 1 or 2 documents but it soon becomes a pain. Also OpenOffice can save in "pdf" formats which everyone can read, although i think AbiWord probably can too.

Firefox is faster in Xubuntu with the amount of ram you have but there are other web-browsers which it might be worth installing to try them out.

Also when you are installing Xubuntu it might help quite a considerable amount if you could set the linux-swap partition to be the first partition on the hard-drive, then the root partition and then have the /home partition separate to increase how robust your system is. Hard-drive read/writes can be twice as fast at the front of the drive as they are at the end. Since your ram & swap will be caching a lot of the read/writes to your data in the /home partition and will be doing a lot of other work too it would be well worth putting swap at the front of the drive. I would layout the partitions like this

sda1 Primary Partition 786Mb 'file-system' = linux-swap
sda2 Primary Partition 4Gb 'file-system' = ext4 & Mount Point = /
sda3 Primary Partition 10Gb file-system = ext4 & Mount Point = /home

Note that you set the "Mount Points" in the "Manual Partitioning" section of the installer.

I hope something here helps!
If the machine's spec. was any lower then i would recommend using a completely different distro but Xubuntu should be fine on this machine, especially if you are used to the speed of Windows :)

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

I installed Xubuntu.
The system is no faster. If anything, it is slower.

Is my system incompatible with Ubuntu / Xubuntu?

Hi

Please get to a command-line
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UsingTheTerminal#Starting%20a%20Terminal
and copy and paste the results of these commands into here

free -m

sudo fdisk -l

Xubuntu and Ubuntu have a lot that is basically identically the same. It might be better to go to the head of the family and install Debian or else go to a completely different family such as Wolvix from the Slackware family. Slackware distros often tend to be very light and faster but have a reputation for being more techie, however i don't think that's really fair for most things and in most cases; Wolvix, Vector, Zenwalk, Absolute and others, particularly the first two have grown onto the desktop a lot in the last few years. First it would be good to check a couple of things tho and see if we can just re-arrange things to work faster without too much of a struggle.
Thanks and regards from
Tom :)

Responses:

Memory -
free -m

             total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 300 269 30 0 2 65
-/+ buffers/cache: 201 98
Swap: 643 142 500

Disk Drive
sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 15.0 GB, 15020457984 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1826 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x198e198d

   Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 1744 14008648+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 1745 1826 658665 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 1745 1826 658633+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Hi :)

Yes we can see that the linux-swap is at the end of the drive and inside a Logical Partition which is itself inside an Extended Partition. We can almost certainly increase the speed of this install of Xubuntu.

Can you bootup from the Xubuntu Cd to a LiveCd session?
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD
In the LiveCd session go up to the top taskbar and click on

System - Administration - Partition Editor

which should open GPartEd. Try right-click on sda1 to "umount" it and then right-click again to resize it down to something like 13600Mb. This should leave something like 700Mb after it? Click on the "Apply" button. Then right-click on sda1 again but this time move it so that the 700Mb empty grey 'unallocated' space is at the front of the drive. It will take a long time to complete this move, maybe an hour or perhaps 2.

When it's done that create a new Primary Partition filling the space at the front of the drive and make it's 'file-system' = linux-swap
Hopefully when you reboot you should notice a reasonable speed increase.

Please let us know how this goes!
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Just for an Update.

I tried several other lower spec versions of Linux. None of them were much faster and were a lot harder to use.

I just bought a reconditioned Dell computer for about $150 US. It has XP on it and an 80 GB hard drive. I have installed it a dual boot machine (XP / Ubuntu) with each having half of the drive. I am used to XP from both Work and my home laptop.

Initial observations:

XP took 30 minutes, numerous reboots and questions to unpack and do the initial install. Downloading updates took an additional 20 minutes.

After the XP install, Ubuntu took 32 minutes to install, including the repartitioning and questions specific to the dual boot. Installing both network printers and the network drive took less than 5 minutes. Updates took longer approx 2 hours, but I went to bed and it was done in the morning so it was little hassle.

Installing the printers and network drive on XP took a lot more hassle. In particular, the HP inkjet printer took a 2 hour download and 20 minutes of configuring drivers, other software, etc. (This, I admit is a HP problem, not a Microsoft problem)

So far, no real problems with Ubuntu.

Thanks for your help earlier.