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Best OS For Netbooks and Underpowered Tablets?
vigmeister writes "I hopped on the netbook bandwagon early this year in a rather odd fashion by picking up an outdated portable tablet (Fujitsu P1510) which just about matches the latest, greatest netbooks for their performance and portability features, while nipping them by managing to give me a better battery life. I've been happy using XP Tablet on this machine until recently, when I started thinking that by optimizing the OS for targeted use, I may be able to squeeze more out of the device. So, my questions are: What OS would you recommend for a netbook/outdated laptop? Usage is typically light — web surfing (with multimedia), email, word processing, spreadsheet and reading PDFs. Also, what OS would you recommend for a ultraportable tablet? Usage is similar to a netbook; there's a little more document editing going on, and good handwriting recognition and note-taking software would be great."
Read on for further details about vigmeister's question.
vigmeister continues, "I would like for the user experience to be snappy on a computer that is essentially running the equivalent of a 1.2 GHz PIII with 512mb RAM. The other objective for both of these is to maximize the battery life, as that is the major drawback of these ultraportables. A small memory footprint would work wonders, since the hard drives on these devices are typically slow and completely suck the joy out of using them when swap space is being used. Any tips? If you are still using your outdated laptops/tablets productively, please share with us how you're doing it, so we can too."
I run Kubuntu 8.04 on a Compaq Evo N410c, which is a 1.2GHz P-III with 512MB memory. It's just fine.
The full desktop environments are fat, but not slow. The limiting factor for your free Unix is not CPU - a few hundred MHz will do fine - but memory. I also have a P-II 450MHz desktop running FreeBSD with KDE, and it works marvellously because it's got 704MB RAM.
The other thing is screen resolution - but Xandros on the Eee at 800x480 is quite usable. Perhaps play with the Ubuntu Netbook remix.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I have a Thinkpad x61 Tablet that I use to take notes at school; It's running gentoo (mostly so I could have a better chance at making all the obscure features work).
If you do decide to go with linux, no matter the distro, the programs I've found useful are CellWriter, for an onscreen keyboard and handwriting recognition, and Xournal for note-taking. Xournal does well with the tablet's pressure sensitivity and higher resolution.
I actually have one of these (a P1510D), and I was just thinking about this! :-)
My P1510D is running Ubuntu 8.04 and dualbooting XP Tablet Edition; the Linux side isn't as reliable as the Windows side, unfortunately. I've got a page of notes here on how I got Linux working on the thing; you need to fool around with Perl to get a touchscreen "driver" working and install another group of applications to get the buttons working.
Mine doesn't have Bluetooth, so I can't comment on that; wifi finally works out of the box, suspend is OK, hibernate is iffy, xrandr+compiz=crash, I haven't figured out how to get the fingerprint reader to work, the touchscreen "driver" likes to crap out and doesn't work too well, et cetera. Can't comment on the battery, since my battery is done for (it lasts for about 20 minutes before dying, on Windows or Linux).
If you want specifics, let me know--I've spent a few weeks digging up stuff.
If you're looking for linux recommendations, I can't recommend Mandriva 2009 enough for this purpose. With their experience with the Classmate PC, Mandriva went ahead and integrated all their smooth netbook features into their OS. Mandriva 2009 in particular now provides an available default LXDE desktop, which is far lighter than KDE or Gnome and less spartan than XFCE. In addition, any configuration settings dialogs deficient in LXDE can be made up with the Mandriva Control Center.
On that same note, you might consider gOS 3, which will provide a lovely and lightweight interface on top of Ubuntu but customized directly for the needs of a netbook. It's a very realistic distribution, with ample codecs, default Wine, and a nice implmentation of Mozilla Prism for running web apps as desktop apps. (not that that makes any sense)
Now, if you're looking for a Windows system, there's always Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PC's, a smooth and lightweight XP installatiion weighing in at under a gig default and using the XP embedded kernel. You can find that lyin' around somewhere on the web if you look hard enough- though you can't buy it. Oh yes, and it's full XP with no activation subsystem. ;)
I am writing this on an old Fujitsu P2010 running Puppy Linux. I am completely satisfied with this setup. A full-sized Linux distribution is slow to boot and slow to run on this machine. I used to have Ubuntu installed on it and the performance was not acceptable. Puppy boots quickly and provides all the facilities that you asked for.
Let me introduce you to PowerTOP. Come back after you try it.
The state you are in while your HEAD is detached... - wait, what?
Serious response here: I gave up on windows ME/2000 and switched to windows flp. gotta pirate it, but it works wonders! (of course, nlite works wonders too)...
Handwriting recognition in Linux can be quite decent. CellWriter (http://risujin.org/cellwriter/) is one of the better handwriting-recognition tools for *nix and it is what I use on my Gateway S-7125C tablet. It's a little better than the handwriting recognition in XP Tablet 2005 but worse than Vista's. XP Tablet will run fine on a 1.2 GHz CPU but might balk a bit at 512 MB RAM, particularly if the OP wants to use MS Office 2003 or 2007, which are far from lightweight apps. Windows Vista certainly does have excellent tablet integration, but it's just going to take one look at a machine with 512 MB RAM and laugh. That pretty much leaves Linux and Linux would run reasonably nicely on a 1.2 GHz machine with 512 MB RAM. I had Debian Lenny running on a Celeron 900 with 256 MB RAM up until just a few weeks ago and it ran pretty well for being 8-year-old hardware.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
I have an Acer Aspire One netbook. It has a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor (with hyperthreading, evidently), 1.5GB of RAM (I upgraded it from 512MB), an 8GB SSD drive, and a 1024x600 screen.
It came with "Linpus" (a horrid distro of Linux), which inspired me to try to install a different operating system. (It performed OK, but they did their best to hide any advanced functionality like, you know, installing a program. No package manager for you!).
If you're a college student, Google "Microsoft DreamSpark." Ballmer is giving out free, full licenses to Windows Server 2003 and 2008, amongst other things, presumably to brainwash the latest generation of human capital. So, I installed Server 2003 Standard on my tiny little netbook and got some Enhanced Write Filter drivers from an XP Embedded ISO. It runs amazingly fast (EWF drivers are similar to what Live CDs use - writes are committed to memory instead of disk, which makes fetching those files later extremely fast), and can even play World of Warcraft.
So, what I suggest you do is figure out how to get Enhanced Write Filter drivers working on your machine. Prior to installing them on my machine, Firefox was almost unusable - scrolling down one line would cause a torrent of disk activity, which would lock the machine until it was finished. (Windows really isn't meant for solid state drives, it seems.) After installing those drivers, it boots faster than my gaming rig, and is hyper-responsive.
Since Tablet XP seems to have the proper handwriting support you want, try installing those drivers. It made my Server 2003 install perform leaps and bounds better; I'm sure it'll help XP Tablet, too.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Ah, WinFLP=Windows for Legacy PCs. For those too lazy to google it themselves.
All your base are belong to Wii.