Green Tech Girl

My old Pentium III laptop has served as my testbed for Linux distributions that can work on older computers. So far, I’ve had Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS 2007, Linux Mint, and Puppy Linux installed. Most worked fairly well, except Linux Mint had a problem recognizing the 1400×1050 pixel monitor, and Puppy Linux screwed up my USB mouse.

I did like how fast Puppy Linux was, but the USB mouse problem was something I was unable to fix and made it not worth keeping the distro. (I also found Puppy to be a bit too techie in its style.) PCLinuxOS 2007 was actually the best, most stable Linux distro I’d had on here, but I was concerned they were moving to KDE 4 and knew that would never work on an old computer. Concerned about upgrades, I dropped PCLinuxOS to test other distros.

Fortunately, the PCLOS community has come out with a new flavor based on the LXDE desktop, so I can stop worrying about a forced KDE 4 upgrade. (They’ve also decided to stick to KDE 3.5 for their main release as well.)

Of course, I opted for the LXDE install. I’d never tried it, much less heard of it, but the screenshots looked nice enough. The LXDE version of PCLinuxOS comes as Live CD that doubles as the install disk. Installation was fairly easy, but I missed the information about logging in as root when I signed in. Because I was logged in as “guest,” when I hit the install button, I was asked for a password. You’d think after years of playing around with Linux I might have figured out to type in “root,” but I had no clue what to do. (I had to search the Wiki to see what to enter.) This could truly throw off a newbie.

This minor gripe aside, the rest of the installation was a snap, and I had the system running in no time. No painful configuration to deal with – pretty much everything worked out of the box. Even video including, amazingly, Flash in the web browser! PCLXDE comes with Midori as the default web browser. I have no idea what Midori is based on, but it works great on this old laptop.

The stripped down LXDE version of PCLOS includes a small selection of programs, including the AbiWord word processor, a simple soltaire card game, and a few basic Internet tools. OpenOffice.org is easily installed with pretty much the click of a button. Synaptic Package Manager is available on the toolbar for easy installation of other programs. And the best part about PCLXDE is the Control Center, which makes it easy manage the system. This is really one of the most professional-looking aspects of PCLinuxOs, which is sure to impress non-Linux friends who might be otherwise skeptical of Linux.

As for LXDE, it is an amazing desktop. Fast, attractive, and very easy to use. I have Gnome running on my Linux Mint installations, and I am never quite happy with it. It just doesn’t feel “modern” to me. But LXDE has that nice polished feel that makes you feel like you are actually using a modern-day piece of desktop software. I don’t feel like I’m using “Linux” here…I’m just using a computer.

I had a few minor problems: I screwed up installing my wifi card but somehow managed to get it working after some poking around. For a moment there, though, I thought I had really screwed up my wifi drivers. This could be improved in terms of making it a bit more bulletproof.

The monitor also had to be manually set to the 1400×1050 size, though at least this setting held once I adjusted it (as for some reason Mint didn’t like those monitor specs and kept starting up X server with the wrong monitor resolution). And the installed Twitter application would not let you open your account unless you had put in your “default keyring” password, which you would not know because you haven’t set it yet. (You have to go into your home directory and delete the default keyring file hidden in there to get this to work…kind of annoying.)

Otherwise, I am excited to be web browsing and even watching YouTube on this old computer – though it’s a bit jerky due to the low RAM I have on here (only 256 MB). I have had so many problems with Flash on my other computers with Mint installs that I’m wondering if I shouldn’t just switch them to PCLOS. We’ll see.

Verdict: Big thumbs up. I would highly recommend PCLinuxOS 2009, the LXDE version, to anyone who has an old computer that needs new life breathed into it. This is probably the best Linux distro I’ve found for this computer, and I’m going to keep it.

Computer:

Sony Vaio
Pentium III
850 MHz
256 MB RAM
20 Gig harddrive
Netgear PCMCIA Wifi Card (WG511)

PCLXDE default installed software:

Midori – Web Browser with Flash and Multimedia playback
Abiword -Word Processor (Get Open Office available after hd install)
ePDFView – PDF Viewer
Leafpad -Tex Editor.
Transmission – Bittorrent Client
Emesene – Instant Messenger
XChat – IRC Client
Sylpheed – Email and News Reader
GRDC – Remote Desktop Client
GPicView – Graphic Viewer
MTPaint – Graphic Drawing Client
Alsaplayer – Music Player
Mplayer – Video Player
PCMan – File Manager
Simple Backup – Backup Software
Xfburn – CD/DVD Burning Software
Gnome  PPP – Dial up Client
File Roller – Archiving Software
PCLinuxOS Control Center – Adminstration Tool
LXDECC – LXDE Control Center (provided by Lord UnR34l)
AddLocale – Convert LXDE into your language
XPat2 – Card Playing Suite
Tiwtux – Twitter Client
Grsync – Graphical Rsync Client
Virtualbox Additions added

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