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Re: So am I like DarthVader now or what ?

Posted: Sat Mar 31, 2012 12:42 pm
by Chewi
Apparently you can move those with Ubuntu Tweak but it's not ready for 12.04 yet. XFCE allows you to lay those buttons out however you like.

Re: So am I like DarthVader now or what ?

Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2012 6:49 pm
by Matt
What about (been asking around) Lubuntu
System Requirements

A Pentium II or Celeron system with 128 MB of RAM is probably a bottom-line configuration that may yield slow yet usable system with Lubuntu. It should be possible to install and run Lubuntu with less memory, but the result will likely not be suitable for practical use.
LAtest version is 12.04LTS.. Seems like it might do!

Re: So am I like DarthVader now or what ?

Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2012 10:41 pm
by Chewi
Ubuntu Tweak isn't a distro, if that's what you meant. It's just an application for twiddling some knobs. :P

I mentioned Lubuntu earlier. It's based on the LXDE desktop. Extremely lightweight. I've never used it so I can't comment on what you might find lacking. I've been a happy XFCE user for about 7 years now.

Re: So am I like DarthVader now or what ?

Posted: Tue Apr 03, 2012 11:30 am
by Matt
I gathered that you sausage :P

http://cdn.overclock.net/a/a8/a8cd4538_Ozone.png

The DE looks pretty good. I'm in two minds but I need to do something today as she's ready for it. I may log in and see if I can take a backup of the current partition and install Lubuntu, if that sucks, restore the 12.04LTS I installed last week.

Re: So am I like DarthVader now or what ?

Posted: Tue Apr 03, 2012 11:37 am
by Chewi
You don't have to install it, just try the Live CD.

Re: So am I like DarthVader now or what ?

Posted: Tue Apr 03, 2012 9:02 pm
by Mik
I used Mint on the lower powered machines on work, pretty similar to Ubuntu (it used to be based on it, now Debian)

Re: So am I like DarthVader now or what ?

Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2012 11:43 am
by Matt
Chewi wrote:You don't have to install it, just try the Live CD.
Yeah buit it was still super slow using the LiveCD. Not to matter though. Jo came in as I was copying and I gave her a quick tour. She liked LXDE much better than Unity so I stopped the copying and installed. Once I got that done it was much quicker. Pretty happy with how this turned out.

Just installing CPU-G (and apparently some GTK dependancies that I need?) to check on the motherboard. I'm fairly certain it supports LGA775 Pentium D CPU's and there's a few on ebay for about £6. Finally found some DDR 1GB sticks also (though they're mega expensive at £10, imho, it's £20 for DDR3 4GB kits at the moment). That should beef it up a fair bit.

Uses around 200-300MB on idle and its easier on the CPU too.


I'm not sure if I've tried Mint. I think I had it ready to go along with Arch a while back, but did Arch first and that totally put me off for a good while. I only had one PC in the house at the time and no smartphone to keep using to find FAQ's and such. Pretty sure that's the one where it installs the basics and you have to install everything via the commandline, including DE, before you get somewhere. Good for barebones people who know what they're doing, not good for me :(

Re: So am I like DarthVader now or what ?

Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2012 1:08 pm
by Chewi
Cool, glad it worked out. There's been a lot of moaning about Unity but I kinda liked it. Starting applications by typing is something I'm more than used to! :lol:

You're right, Arch is targeted more towards people like me. I'd have a hard time moving away from a source-based distro though. Nothing can match that kind of flexibility.

Re: So am I like DarthVader now or what ?

Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2012 7:51 pm
by Matt
I used to have you on speed dial for stuff like that!

Bought a Pentium D 820 (2.8GHz, 2MB L2) to pop in this machine. Not even sure if it'll run. Not officially supported but I'd read a couple of posts within the last few years saying it'll work. Board max FSB is 800, this is 800 and the latest BIOS update was 2007, CPU released in 2005. For £8 it's worth the plunge!

Yeah I didn't mind Unity on my desktop. It was ok and I didn't mind typing to run stuff. Still doing that thorugh the terminal on this box at the moment. Just been pratting around looking for a version of Soulseek to run on here. Downloaded an .rpm for pyslsk and then installed alien to convert it to a .deb... then installed that and totally lost it from there. Typing pyslsk into the terminal doens't run it (not found) and it's not in the menu's. I was about to hunt through /usr/bin/ when I saw an FAQ on a site called nicotine, which turns out is an updated version of pyslsk and is in the repositories. Gotta love Linuxy stuff, eh?

Re: So am I like DarthVader now or what ?

Posted: Sat Apr 07, 2012 12:58 pm
by Matt
Got that PC updated with the latest propitiatory NVidia drivers. That was actually pretty fun. Disabling XServer and the DE, after hitting CTRL+ALT+F1 to get into a non-GUI login, and then running the install script. Totally fucked it up at one point and completely lost access to the desktop environment because the old NV drivers were still installed (from the repos) so the kernel module driver was trying to run on the older drivers whereas Xserver thought it should be using the ones I'd just installed. Actually didn't take me long to sort that out and I didn't even need to use any resources to do that, just my brain. I'm impressed with myself!

So much so I've stuck Lubuntu on my desktop PC and I've been using that mainly for the last few days. I'm on Windows now because I have cookies for this place (got a PM and needed to get in). I changed my password here to something I'll remember but now it wants me to enter a code and no matter how many times I put in the different codes it tells me it was wrong (it wasn't damn you!!). Although LXDE is a bit poo because I there aren't many applets for the panels. I'm going to take a plunge with conky and see if I can wrangle that, if not I'm going to jump to XCFE which can take Gnome applets. Also, what's the deal with losing all audio after updating, eh? Happened on both machines had to completely reinstall GStreamer and (dunno if this helped) all the restricted driver packs (did them all to be sure, including shit not for my distro) to get it working again. Was very confusing.

Ha, don't need Chewi on speed dial anymore!