old laptop Linux Mint and no problems

[h90]

Old Acer Aspire 4810

Centrino Core 2 Solo 1.4 Ghz

GMA 4500MHD

2 GB Ram

I had Windows 7 and it was on the edge of being usable. OK to play music, but even answer emails was a hasle. But used it only when travel

Keyboard died and HD died....so clearly time for a new laptop.

I had an old HD on stock and went to look for a new laptop, but also asked for a new keyboard (900 Baht) to maybe use it just for playing music.

I didn't really find a new laptop that had what I wanted for the budget I wanted. So I thought give it a try with Linux. I tried Linux maybe 5 times before and everytime I got stuck somewhere.

This time Linux Mint Cinnamon 32 bit 17.1

Installed it without problems.

Installed Teamviewer

No problems.....It runs so fast that it feels like new. Wifi works in places where it was too weak at Win7, Wifi is much faster and I can get the new style Wifi which the hardware couldn't before (obviously only the driver couldn't).

Before the course jumped as the pad was too sensitive and it couldn't be reduced in Win7. That is OK now.

So it will be good for another 6-12 month till maybe the hardware gives up.

Absolut perfect, not a single annoyance so far. Too good to be true.

Saves me a 20-25.000 Baht.

I think I have to mention that after many postings why Linux doesn't work for me in the past.....

Any tipps, tricks for a newbie like me?

I would need a virtual machine (VirtualBox) with WinXP for a special software (maybe Win2000 would also work, Win7 does not). But I think that would be too much for that oldtimer, not worth to try, or shall I?

[h90]

It seems it eats the battery faster than before. Maybe it can't do the energy safe functions as perfect?

Any idea on that?

But not important......

Once I had a freeze. Only mouse working....but the hardware is old as well....ist there something like a ctrl-alt-del?

[doctormann]

You could try installing TLP to improve your battery life. I'm running it in Mint 17 on my Lenovo Idea Pad and it does seem to help.

Details from this link:

http://www.webupd8.org/2013/04/improve-power-usage-battery-life-in.html

The info. is written for Ubuntu but is equally applicable to Mint.

Good luck - nice to see someone trying out Linux instead of MS bloatware!

DM

[h90]

You could try installing TLP to improve your battery life. I'm running it in Mint 17 on my Lenovo Idea Pad and it does seem to help.

Details from this link:

http://www.webupd8.org/2013/04/improve-power-usage-battery-life-in.html

The info. is written for Ubuntu but is equally applicable to Mint.

Good luck - nice to see someone trying out Linux instead of MS bloatware!

DM

Thx, can I just install (type in the commands without knowing what I do) without much risk?

(I just fresh installed it, so if I wrack it, I plug in the usb stick and install it new, so beside I lost 1 hour not a big drama).

Before I tried Linux a couple of times and had various problems....specially printer driver, but not only. But this laptop won't be print at all, I only send pdfs to my staff. Video performance is a bit worse, but installing the intel driver on mint is problematic and I don't need to watch movies on it.

The biggest help for Linux was Mr. Balmer....If they would have continued with Win2000 or even with the worse WinXP, optimizing it, just making the desktop better, they would have an unbeatable OS...but no, they gave a lot reason to use alternatives.....If my experiences continue like that I may change some office machines to Linux as well.

[doctormann]

You could try installing TLP to improve your battery life. I'm running it in Mint 17 on my Lenovo Idea Pad and it does seem to help.

Details from this link:

http://www.webupd8.org/2013/04/improve-power-usage-battery-life-in.html

The info. is written for Ubuntu but is equally applicable to Mint.

Good luck - nice to see someone trying out Linux instead of MS bloatware!

DM

Thx, can I just install (type in the commands without knowing what I do) without much risk?

(I just fresh installed it, so if I wrack it, I plug in the usb stick and install it new, so beside I lost 1 hour not a big drama).

Before I tried Linux a couple of times and had various problems....specially printer driver, but not only. But this laptop won't be print at all, I only send pdfs to my staff. Video performance is a bit worse, but installing the intel driver on mint is problematic and I don't need to watch movies on it.

The biggest help for Linux was Mr. Balmer....If they would have continued with Win2000 or even with the worse WinXP, optimizing it, just making the desktop better, they would have an unbeatable OS...but no, they gave a lot reason to use alternatives.....If my experiences continue like that I may change some office machines to Linux as well.

TLP has a sort of 'fit and forget' mode - just accept the default parameters and leave it at that. Should be OK in most cases.

I've been tinkering with various Linux distros for years - with varying degrees of success. At one time you needed to be a bit of a 'geek' to use Linux but times have moved on and now we have Mint, which is very user-friendly. Mint is a fork of Ubuntu and shares basically the same kernel and virtually all of the same applications. Anything that works in Ubuntu will probably work in Mint. There can still be some issues with printer and scanner support but the situation is improving all the time.

Both Ubuntu and Mint are Debian derivatives so software installation is usually now just a matter of finding the application in the repository, when installation is more or less automatic or, if you need a third party application, downloading the appropriate deb file and using the deb package installer, which comes with Mint as standard. Thankfully, you don't need to compile and link packages very often these days.

I have had absolutely no issues with Mint 17 - I may upgrade to 17.1 at some stage but may well wait for the next Long Term Support release. I was previously using Mint 13 and had no issues with that release either. Linux just seems to be rock solid - never falls over!

I've just been playing with SuperX and that seems pretty good as well. Works straight out of the box, so to speak. I have a complete installation on a USB stick - it runs a bit slowly but otherwise everything works.

If you really need to maintain Windows compatibility, Linux has a Windows emulator, called Wine, which lets you run some windows applications from within Linux. A better option, however, in my experience, is to use something like Virtual Box. This lets you install Windows as a guest OS and you can then run any windows applications that you wish. You do, however, need the installation disk for whatever version of Windows that you want to use. Once set up it's pretty painless and you can transfer files between the host OS (Linux) and the guest OS (Windows) very easily.

Have fun.

DM

[h90]

You could try installing TLP to improve your battery life. I'm running it in Mint 17 on my Lenovo Idea Pad and it does seem to help.

Details from this link:

http://www.webupd8.org/2013/04/improve-power-usage-battery-life-in.html

The info. is written for Ubuntu but is equally applicable to Mint.

Good luck - nice to see someone trying out Linux instead of MS bloatware!

DM

Thx, can I just install (type in the commands without knowing what I do) without much risk?

(I just fresh installed it, so if I wrack it, I plug in the usb stick and install it new, so beside I lost 1 hour not a big drama).

Before I tried Linux a couple of times and had various problems....specially printer driver, but not only. But this laptop won't be print at all, I only send pdfs to my staff. Video performance is a bit worse, but installing the intel driver on mint is problematic and I don't need to watch movies on it.

The biggest help for Linux was Mr. Balmer....If they would have continued with Win2000 or even with the worse WinXP, optimizing it, just making the desktop better, they would have an unbeatable OS...but no, they gave a lot reason to use alternatives.....If my experiences continue like that I may change some office machines to Linux as well.

TLP has a sort of 'fit and forget' mode - just accept the default parameters and leave it at that. Should be OK in most cases.

I've been tinkering with various Linux distros for years - with varying degrees of success. At one time you needed to be a bit of a 'geek' to use Linux but times have moved on and now we have Mint, which is very user-friendly. Mint is a fork of Ubuntu and shares basically the same kernel and virtually all of the same applications. Anything that works in Ubuntu will probably work in Mint. There can still be some issues with printer and scanner support but the situation is improving all the time.

Both Ubuntu and Mint are Debian derivatives so software installation is usually now just a matter of finding the application in the repository, when installation is more or less automatic or, if you need a third party application, downloading the appropriate deb file and using the deb package installer, which comes with Mint as standard. Thankfully, you don't need to compile and link packages very often these days.

I have had absolutely no issues with Mint 17 - I may upgrade to 17.1 at some stage but may well wait for the next Long Term Support release. I was previously using Mint 13 and had no issues with that release either. Linux just seems to be rock solid - never falls over!

I've just been playing with SuperX and that seems pretty good as well. Works straight out of the box, so to speak. I have a complete installation on a USB stick - it runs a bit slowly but otherwise everything works.

If you really need to maintain Windows compatibility, Linux has a Windows emulator, called Wine, which lets you run some windows applications from within Linux. A better option, however, in my experience, is to use something like Virtual Box. This lets you install Windows as a guest OS and you can then run any windows applications that you wish. You do, however, need the installation disk for whatever version of Windows that you want to use. Once set up it's pretty painless and you can transfer files between the host OS (Linux) and the guest OS (Windows) very easily.

Have fun.

DM

Thanks, yes I'll need WinXP....if the Laptop is strong enough.....Currently when out of the office I used teamviewer to connect to my office computer (Win7) who has a Virtual Box with WinXP. Surprisingly that works, but not so good to work with. But I only need it once a week or less.

Can't remember where my WinXP CD is.......

[RKASA]

I find running windows in VB with less then 1.6GB ram is a problem most the time. If it is a few apps then see if something like wine won't run them for you. I think wine might work better if you have less then 4GB of ram to split with windows while running a virtual OS. 1.4Ghz dual core should be fine I have run that in a laptop with wine and virtualbox, but had up graded the RAM to 4GB. I ran PClinuxOS with virtualbox and had both winXP and Win7 32bit but not at the same time naturally. The virtual install on the set will not game well at all gets a rating of like 1.

[h90]

I find running windows in VB with less then 1.6GB ram is a problem most the time. If it is a few apps then see if something like wine won't run them for you. I think wine might work better if you have less then 4GB of ram to split with windows while running a virtual OS. 1.4Ghz dual core should be fine I have run that in a laptop with wine and virtualbox, but had up graded the RAM to 4GB. I ran PClinuxOS with virtualbox and had both winXP and Win7 32bit but not at the same time naturally. The virtual install on the set will not game well at all gets a rating of like 1.

Well, I could upgrade memory but who knows how long that laptop will live.......Win7 was very slow on it. Wine is no option.....Most of the software is designed for DOS, and modified to work on Win95, it also works on Win2000 and WinXP but higher it doesn't work, so I am sure wine won't do it.

But I'll try VirtualBox. I don't need that software often, so I could wait 10 seconds after every mouseclick

[Richard-BKK]

What about DOSBOX? It can run almost any MS Dos program ... I have even seen people running MS Windows 3.11 with DOSBOX, and I believe that the latest version of DOSBOX can even run Windows 95 and 98... and have minimum impact on performance...

Edited May 20, 2015 by Richard-BKK

[Gumballl]

Depending on the age of the laptop, you may have to retire it.

I have an old laptop (Compaq Presario, Pentium M, 2GB RAM), that I still use. It hosts Linux XFCE. It sits atop my ancient Yamaha receiver, and it doles out the Pandora music like there is no tomorrow.

For everything else... I just use another computer.

P.S. I bought this laptop in February 2004.

Edited May 22, 2015 by Gumballl

[agogohome]

I was given an old Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop that I tried running Windows Mint 17.1 on. I thought everything was fine 'till I realised the WiFi wasn't working! I don't know if that was because of a driver missing, because I even tried connecting an old LAN cable, and that didn't work either!

[jpinx]

For the OP, I ran an eeepc with 2 gbs ram and virtualbox ran XP on 1gb of that, but beware -- you need to configure virtualbox to use usb ports and to see the linux filesystem - assuming you've installed a ext2fs driver in your vm's XP. If you can get that sorted it'll work for occasional use.

I now have an old thinkpad X201 with 4 gbs RAm running the same vm of XP but now on 2 gbs of the ram, and the difference is huge. fwiw - I got the refurbished Thinkpad from amazon for £150 delivered in UK.

Edit -- forgot to say that I run Debian stable as the main host OS.

Edited May 30, 2015 by jpinx

[h90]

For the OP, I ran an eeepc with 2 gbs ram and virtualbox ran XP on 1gb of that, but beware -- you need to configure virtualbox to use usb ports and to see the linux filesystem - assuming you've installed a ext2fs driver in your vm's XP. If you can get that sorted it'll work for occasional use.

I now have an old thinkpad X201 with 4 gbs RAm running the same vm of XP but now on 2 gbs of the ram, and the difference is huge. fwiw - I got the refurbished Thinkpad from amazon for £150 delivered in UK.

Edit -- forgot to say that I run Debian stable as the main host OS.

Thanks, I'll give it a try later......I won't need it often and than just a few clicks and print to pdf.

Lets see maybe I can squeeze another 6-12 month out of it.

[jpinx]

For the OP, I ran an eeepc with 2 gbs ram and virtualbox ran XP on 1gb of that, but beware -- you need to configure virtualbox to use usb ports and to see the linux filesystem - assuming you've installed a ext2fs driver in your vm's XP. If you can get that sorted it'll work for occasional use.

I now have an old thinkpad X201 with 4 gbs RAm running the same vm of XP but now on 2 gbs of the ram, and the difference is huge. fwiw - I got the refurbished Thinkpad from amazon for £150 delivered in UK.

Edit -- forgot to say that I run Debian stable as the main host OS.

Thanks, I'll give it a try later......I won't need it often and than just a few clicks and print to pdf.

Lets see maybe I can squeeze another 6-12 month out of it.

I managed to keep the old eeepc going long past it's expiry date - until I dropped it and bust the lid-hinge irrepairably. Linux allowed me to run it with the lid closed and use a wifi mouse and keyboard, and plugged into my TV. If I hadn't needed portability I'd still be using it. Linux also allows me to easily link the eeepc, my new stinkpad and my android phone by Wifi, and using sshfs they all appear as filesystems everywhere. You'll have fun writing some very simple but effective shell scripts to make it all happen as you want it.

You realise that linux might well drive your printer anyway? Lots of drivers are now built into the kernel and loads more are available for download. You can not rely on printer makers telling you it'll run on linux -- you need to research that yourself. If you want some pointers, feel free to ask in here. There's a few linux-heads around who have a natural tendency to be helpful There's also forums for the Linux flavour you choose, and irc too. Welcome to the club

[h90]

For the OP, I ran an eeepc with 2 gbs ram and virtualbox ran XP on 1gb of that, but beware -- you need to configure virtualbox to use usb ports and to see the linux filesystem - assuming you've installed a ext2fs driver in your vm's XP. If you can get that sorted it'll work for occasional use.

I now have an old thinkpad X201 with 4 gbs RAm running the same vm of XP but now on 2 gbs of the ram, and the difference is huge. fwiw - I got the refurbished Thinkpad from amazon for £150 delivered in UK.

Edit -- forgot to say that I run Debian stable as the main host OS.

Thanks, I'll give it a try later......I won't need it often and than just a few clicks and print to pdf.

Lets see maybe I can squeeze another 6-12 month out of it.

I managed to keep the old eeepc going long past it's expiry date - until I dropped it and bust the lid-hinge irrepairably. Linux allowed me to run it with the lid closed and use a wifi mouse and keyboard, and plugged into my TV. If I hadn't needed portability I'd still be using it. Linux also allows me to easily link the eeepc, my new stinkpad and my android phone by Wifi, and using sshfs they all appear as filesystems everywhere. You'll have fun writing some very simple but effective shell scripts to make it all happen as you want it.

You realise that linux might well drive your printer anyway? Lots of drivers are now built into the kernel and loads more are available for download. You can not rely on printer makers telling you it'll run on linux -- you need to research that yourself. If you want some pointers, feel free to ask in here. There's a few linux-heads around who have a natural tendency to be helpful There's also forums for the Linux flavour you choose, and irc too. Welcome to the club

yeah hinge is also broken, but it can be opened and close carefully, but one day I'll have it separate....some screws are missing, HD is exchange and at some point something more will fail....

I don't need a printer at the moment, I print to .pdf and email to the office. I use thunderbird for emails and I can simply copy the folder over and it works on Win7 and Linux exactly the same.

And the big advantage I don't need to worry or be overly carefully anymore. If it brakes it brakes, if someone steals it, he can read my emails but much value isn't lost.....

Actually when reading Newspaper, book flights on the internet and answer emails what is the problem if the laptop lags 0.3 seconds sometimes. Not beautiful but no real harm.....Not worth a 25.000 for a new one.

For yours I see couple of applications, I guess it doesn't need much electric so it would be a nice NAS (Media Server, for backups), can be used to download torrents, etc.