Posted on 04/06/2014 1:04:45 PM PDT by Mad Dawgg
I got an older Compaq Presario Laptop and I've been toying with the idea of putting Ubuntu on it. I was wondering if I would need to totally wipe the HD to get Ubuntu to run properly or can I install it while leaving Windows 7 on and it will still run OK.
I am going to get a new laptop eventually but am in no hurry so it would be nice to still keep windows But I can manage for now without it being I use my Entertainment System Computer most of the time.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions and tips.
Last night, I needed a fresh Linux virtual machine. So, I decided to give Ubuntu 14.04 Final Beta a whirl. I was using Virtual Box, hosted on a seven-year-old Windows box in the basement and accessed from my laptop via Remote Desktop. Definitely not a high-performance graphics environment!
It sucked. They've added some fancy visual window transitions to Unity, and they were making the system crawl. Running top in a terminal window (after patiently waiting for it to open in response to Ctrl-Alt-T) showed compiz taking a lot of time. Allegedly, there are tools to turn off the graphics hacks, but they didn't do anything. I'll have to try it again in while, using the release version when it becomes available.
So, since fancy graphics wasn't really my focus, I deleted the new VM and made another one using the Ubuntu 12.04 Desktop ISO. It runs fine.
I also have 12.04 on a $300 low-powered real machine (Intel D-525, 2mb RAM, 40g SSD). I used the Alternate Install CD and set up a Flex-based window manager with a highly customized menu. It is very snappy and plays videos nicely. I suspect it would also run 12.04 Desktop just fine, but that wasn't my need.
Duh! That should be 2gb RAM.
Current Apple laptops are pretty much all SSD. Checking the lineup, it looks like only the bottom end MacBook Pro still has a hard drive (500gb, 5400 rpm). The other MacBook Pros and the two MacBook Air models all have flash storage.
Once you have adequate RAM on a machine, the best way to boost its subjective performance is to substitute an SSD for a hard drive. Next time you visit an Apple Store, bring a stopwatch and time the various models rebooting.
I have two on Ubuntu and one running Mint.
Ubuntu is easy, no hassles but wants you to update all the time. I enjoy Mint on my laptop....but see some others here that sound interesting.
BTW...Ubuntu seems to get slower as you go...just my experience.
My primary concern is reliability of SSDs versus a hard drive. Notice that they recommend true SSDs for reliability versus a thumb drive.
In a related story....
Most media will only last a few years. 10 years if you are lucky. That means all of those baby pictures or wedding pictures will be gone in a few years if a person isn't vigilant. So much for our modern world. DARN IT!
I cited Apple because they are high profile and stand a lot to lose if their laptops start crapping out from bad SSDs.
Limited write endurance is inherent to how SSDs work. However, a lot of work has gone into mitigating that problem through algorithms in the drives' firmware. They work well enough now, that you will probably retire the machine long before you hit its drive's write limit. See for example techreport.com/review/25320/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-22tb-update.
Most media will only last a few years. 10 years if you are lucky. That means all of those baby pictures or wedding pictures will be gone in a few years if a person isn't vigilant. So much for our modern world. DARN IT!
That's why you need to copy such stuff over to fresh media from time to time. Digital copies are bit-for-bit perfect. That means, in 100 years, your photos and other media will look just as good as they do now. You can't say the same for paper or film.
Actually, photographs and film has been more reliable (so far). I have family photos that are 100 years old and are still reasonably good. Same with documents. And 50 year film movies. BTW, I kept the projector and used it to convert to AVI.
As a test, I tried to read some CDs and then DVDs that were 7 years old. Half of them failed. And I stored them in a dark, dry place.
Recordable media, DVDs, etc. are not that reliable. Certainly the manufacturers will claim to last 20 years but will only offer a replacement disk if if it fails.
The good news is that I had backed up the important pictures on a raid drive and then a back up of the raid drive to an external drive. At some point in the future, I’ll have to migrate the files to the newest technology. Hopefully, mpeg2 and jpeg are still standard formats in 20 years.
Also, a certain level of technology is required to recover the files on my disk server which can fail, too. Not so much with photos where only a pair of eyes is needed.
Keep those old pictures and store them away in a dark dry place!!!
I’ve done every possible variation of this exercise and done it many times. Agree with all the comments. Yes shrinking the windows partition is the sore spot. Yes Linux (Ubuntu or any other flavor) will behave when installing on top of windows (but not vice versa).
All things considered I’d get another drive. It’s actually easier on a laptop on a desktop. You can exchange drives on a laptop in a matter of seconds. And then your linux environment is your linux environment and same for windows. A laptop harddrive should set you back somewhere in the $50 to $100 range and it’s probably well worth it for piece of mind and freedom to explore.
If you decide you need to redo your linux install, then boom - you can do that all day long and there won’t ever be a worry of corrupting the other drive.
As many others have stated, go with the “Live” version of Ubuntu on a USB drive first, to see if you like it. In many cases, running from the thumb drive is preferable if you’re running on an older disk bus (i.e. EIDE).
I run linux mint 15 (getting ready to upgrade to 16) on my old laptop. I had an old external usb drive knocking around so I just put mint on it. When I want windows, I unplug the mint drive and boot windows. When I want Linux, I plug the mint drive in and boot to linux. I almost never use windows anyway.
I ran ubuntu for a while, but I like the mint philosophy of careful and reliable upgrades.
Most likely you have a 32 bit system. Try the live CD first (use ImageBurn to born the iso) Do not use the whole drive but choose to use the free space.
What are your specs? Run dxdiag on the Run command and give the CPU and Ram info.
Machine name: HAL
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (6.1, Build 7601) Service Pack 1 (7601.win7sp1_gdr.130828-1532)
Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Manufacturer: Hewlett-Packard
System Model: Presario CQ62 Notebook PC
BIOS: Default System BIOS
Processor: Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 900 @ 2.20GHz, ~2.2GHz
Memory: 2048MB RAM
Available OS Memory: 1978MB RAM
Page File: 1784MB used, 2173MB available
Windows Dir: C:\Windows
DirectX Version: DirectX 11
And thanks all for the info you have bestowed. Lots of fun stuff to try now!
Pinging to post #35
I just loaded Mint onto an older Toshiba laptop. It works great and my son’s can even play Minecraft on it. It would never run that while it was a Windows system.
Damn I hope that is true cuz I wanna do it and make a vid so I can upload it to youtube as computernerd porn. I should be able to retire on the google adsense income!
Vigilance is the key. Back up your stuff!
It's unfortunate but most folks have no idea how to keep what's really important to them safe.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.