Slashdot Mirror
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vigmeister writes "I hopped on the netbook bandwagon early this year in a rather odd fashion by picking up an outdated portable tablet (Fujitsu P1510) which just about matches the latest, greatest netbooks for their performance and portability features, while nipping them by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 So, my questions are: What OS would you recommend for a netbook/outdated laptop?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 If you are still using your outdated laptops/tablets productively, please share with us how you're doing it, so we can too."
Try a *nix -- maybe something like FreeBSD, NetBSD, or OpenBSD.
Need an automatic screenshot taker? Try here.
Why don't you just say what you mean. 'What flavor of linux?'
Just because the engineers response happens to be one that you may disgree with 'religiously' should not impair your ability as an engineer to agree that it makes a better choice for a lowend outdated machine. Attempting to fit a modern, bloated OS with poor security and modern drivers requirements to an outdated machine is not only dumb but childish in assuming that one OS fits all.
Had the option been 'what OS should I use on a modern machine to connect to my other office PC's?' I would probably suggest Windows or Mac unless they happened to BE a developer. But in this case, I would say Linux is the best engineering choice. So get off your high horse and start thinking like an engineer.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
And as a developer, I will state that I've had the opposite experience with Ubuntu on my HP Pavilion dv9000 (Never booted with Vista while in my possession...) and, the previous Pavilion dv6000, the Compaq Evo n800, and my eeePC.
Keep in mind the eeePC with Xandros runs better and actually has a slightly better life than the XP install on the same class of machine. If your claim is correct, why is this the case?
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
unless, perhaps, you can get Office to run under WINE
Which you can. There are options other than OpenOffice.org for Office replacements, in any case.
The state you are in while your HEAD is detached... - wait, what?
This will get modded down or up as funny as anything mentioning Microsoft here, but I have to say it: Vista will work fine.
I have a five year old old HP TC1100 tablet that has a 1.1 GHz Celeron inside. I use it for web surfing, reading and watching TV shows or movies when I take my dog to the park. It had XP Tablet PC edition on it.
Two months ago the hard disk died (I'm pretty hard on hardware) so I decided to try Vista, which I heard has an improved UI for tablet PCs. So I went out and bought a gig of RAM for $40 thus upgrading the computer to 1.5 gigs. I replaced the hard disk with an ancient 4200 IDE disk I had in a drawer somewhere. Then I installed Vista.
Verdict: Big improvement. Vista really does the whole Tablet PC thing better and the computer with the new RAM feels more responsive than it ever did.
Dejan
linux is not great though, even after taking the suggestions from powertop (i believe they are implemented in "laptop-mode" for ubuntu but dont sue me if im wrong), it marginally outperforms windows machines, but still lakes acpi support to make suspend useable (depends on machine ofc). Using a touchpad in xorg also seams to kill battery life.
However what is great is the amount of user interaction with the powersaving, if you use something like kpowersave you just scroll over the icon to change your brightness (which cuts power consumption to nearly half on my laptop), there is also compression on hibernate, which means that you can get back to full desktop much faster than a normal hibernate/boot. In adition using powertop lets you audit your system to see whats wasting your batteries when idle (kicker in KDE is a common suspect, so switching to fluxbox can also give a marginal (5-10 mins) battery life increase)
My point: Linux is no better (and often worse) by default, but if you tweak it you CAN outperfom windows and gain other benifits too (no need for AV, faster boot, faster hibernate, faster file access and chkdsk (reiserfs mainly but ext3 is good too))
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Wow, you really wanted to talk about how it is being an "engineer"...
but,
what does your post have to do with the grandparent post?
nothing...
Actually, the question should be, "Which desktop environment, and which applications?" The desktop environment and applications will eat more resources and have a much bigger impact on performance than the OS.
For Windows, the desktop environment and the OS are pretty thoroughly linked. With Linux, on the other hand, even if you limit yourself to a single major distro such as Ubuntu or Fedora, you can run any desktop environment you like. Lately I've been trying to get acquainted with Fluxbox, which runs just fine (and fast) on my Kubuntu box.
The monolith kernel is the OS. Microkernel tries to make more stable OS by moving as much OS parts to userland as possible.
http://www.usenix.org/publications/login/2006-04/openpdfs/herder.pdf
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0130313580/ref=sib_dp_pt/103-7158569-1619062#reader-link
Monolith kernel is the old way building a OS. Microkernel is the "new" way for building a OS.
But you might be those who believe that OS is that what has desktop, icons, wallpapers etc. And openoffice, Firefox and Gimp are parts of OS?
i said create a new category of low-power PCs, not make all computers low-powered.
you think it's the 50-year-old grandmother who uses AOL to check her e-mail and look up cooking recipes that's pushing the limits of computing technology?
and 15 years ago casual computing didn't exist. home PCs were an esoteric gadget for a very small segment of the population. home PCs didn't become popular until Windows 95 came around, and it wasn't until AOL that the internet became popular and made the home PC a standard appliance in every home. it also helped established the boundaries and applications of casual computing as distinct from hobbyist computing.
it's pretty silly to think that simply increasing clock cycles and power consumption is an indication of technological progress. no one is suggesting that people go back to using CRT monitors, ball mouse, wired keyboards, or pentium I processors. but technology should be refined in ways that increase their utility and improve user experience.
building low power systems that can perform casual computing tasks with less load times, heat output, noise, and take up less space would be a step forward. it's just a step forward in a slightly different direction. i mean, would you consider netbooks, smartphones, internet tablets, and other information appliances steps backward in technology just because they're not using the latest quad core CPUs and $1000 video cards?
save your straw man and red herring arguments. if everyone wanted more expensive computers just to run bloated OSes that provided no performance increase then Windows Vista would be flying off the shelves. but that is not progress in most people's eyes. if casual computing evolves to include more processor/resource-intensive applications in the future then of course baseline processor speeds would have to be increased. but right now it's decreasing software efficiency that's driving hardware upgrades in the casual computing market, not more advanced applications such as in the fields of PC gaming/media design/etc.
perhaps you should learn to read more carefully instead making flawed analogies that have nothing to do with the issue. no one is arguing against technological progress or high end systems. but it doesn't take a quad core workstation with 4 GB of RAM to run Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer when these applications are already starting to show up on cellphones and other $200-300 portable devices.
*whoosh*
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!