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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vigmeister writes "I hopped on the netbook bandwagon early this year in a rather odd fashion by picking up an outdated portable tablet (Fujitsu P1510) which just about matches the latest, greatest netbooks for their performance and portability features, while nipping them by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 So, my questions are: What OS would you recommend for a netbook/outdated laptop?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 If you are still using your outdated laptops/tablets productively, please share with us how you're doing it, so we can too."
If you're happy with XP Tablet, why change?
Anyway, for something like that, I won't advise anything else than some sort of Unix, Ubuntu should fare well with 512 MB RAM or maybe Xubuntu would do better in this case.
As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
I *WANT* to tell you to put some ubuntu on there and tweak it up a bit.
The only real reason that this isnt the best option is that Linux (and BSD) are heavier on battery life than WindowsXP. I run linux on my laptop and have on other laptops and linux sucks down the battery faster.
For a Tablet, batter life is a pretty big thing I think and this is a major issue. I get as much as 30% less battery life out of linux.
That being said, linux has come a long way on this front and this may be remedied pretty soon.
Also, with ubuntu 8.10 as well as new releases of fedora the wireless management is much better.
If you are not concerned with battery life then definitely grab a newer linux distro. Remember that you need to do a number of tweaks for power such as turning the swapiness down and selecting the proper power states.
http://www.zimmers.net/geos/GEOSFAQ.html
You'll have incredible speed based on the original purpose and you will also have access to many free applications.
I wonder why nobody suggested OS-X so far... It is a hack to install on non-Apple hardware, but you'll get the best usability. A Linux or BSD distro will make a usable machine too and as others may have said: sticking with XP is an option too.
Your preference matters most, you'll work with the machine.
extern warranty;
main()
{
(void)warranty;
}
Maybe replace the hard disk with an SSD or low power compact flash?
If you go the CF route then check out Voyage Linux. 'Tis like Debian but made for embedded and low power machines. http://linux.voyage.hk/
(I use it with a PC Engines single board computer running MPD as a source for an audiophile grade USB music server. Just install th OS to CF and apt-get what you need.)
Now, the really funny thing is that all the [insert linux distro here] recommendations are going to ignore one of his requests: maximize battery life. Unfortunately, that's one thing that no Linux...excuse me, GNU/Linux, distro has managed to achieve. We're still trying to hit the Linux on the Desktop benchmark.
It works with 99.999% of everything, and doesn't suck hard like Beasta
Before the destruction of the proprietary home computer market by the PC, software was a lot more efficiently written because the authors couldn't expect people to just upgrade their hardware.
Wait, so I'm looking at the powertop screenshot on its homepage. It's a terminal program for seeing which processes are causing wakeups. And the top four power-hungry processes it shows are my wireless driver, Firefox, Evolution and X! Are you seriously telling me to shut down one of these four things, when the whole point of buying a netbook was to get email and internet on the go? What use is this to me?
Oh, apart from that it suggests that I turn off bluetooth. Brilliant, not like every other OS says the same thing. And I like how I have to type in two terminal commands and remove a kernel module to do it, whereas on Windows you just rightclick the bluetooth icon in the tray and hit disable.
Powertop is top is nice, but it's a diagnostic tool. It's incredibly naive to suppose that Microsoft, Apple, etc don't have their own. It's also mostly useless to any user who is not a software professional.
Actually, i still have an old PC with a Pentium II MMX and Windows 95 on it, and it's the 2nd fastest booting PC I got, after my Athlon 64 with Ubuntu. On the other hand I think that any flavor of Linux is more likely to have up-to-date drivers, especially for a tablet PC, than Win95
Oh, and the critical factor for battery life? Run a recent Linux.
Spell it out clearly for the newbies. Run a recent KERNEL. (that's Linux folks)
one keyword here would be 'tickless'
Well... That slimmed down XP sounds darned interesting. I think I'll add it to my netboot options over my lan for possible installation.
And after a long and hard search, 30 seconds later, here's the link.
Since you cant buy it, I see no reason why we cant download and use it. It does need a cdkey, from that which you will need yours.
I have just acquired a hp tc1100 tablet and am happily using ubuntu on it. It does require a fair bit of configuration though.
1) ubuntu now comes with xorg auto configuration, you need to undo that and write a custom xorg.conf to include tablet support (plenty of guides out there)
2) you need to modify /etc/gdm/Init/Default to launch an on screen keyboard (OSK) so you can log in and /etc/gdm/PreLogin/Default to kill the OSK after logging in if you want to use another one for normal text entry. Also, you need to turn off the fancy login screen and use the plain one
3) get cellwriter and train it, it's good and comes with an integrated OSK
4) configure your drivers to support RandR and use the script here http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Wacom_Serial_Tablet_PC_Stylus to enable rotation between portrait and landscape mode
5) if you are using intrepid and have nvidia hardware, nvidia binary blob drivers will not work yet (nvidia has not updated for new xorg yet)
6) xournal is easily comparable to windows journal but requires a bit of fiddling to get the preferences just right. Also, it has drawing problems if you set your zoom level to anything BELOW fit to width
7) I use opera for browsing as the sidepane menu is so versatile. Also, it supports drag scrolling by setting the about:config options "scroll is drag"
8) evince unfortunately only supports drag scrolling using the middle mouse button and does not offer any way of configuring that. (bugs have been submitted though)
Arch Linux with a stripped down desktop (i.e., no KDE, no GNOME, something light and simple like fvwm or fluxbox) fills my needs wonderfully.
But that's me.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Reguardless of the posts that say they get better battery life on linux, there is an overwhelming amount of information on generally poor battery life on linux.
To clarify, I dont think this is some sort of technical weakness but rather a lack of focus on laptops by many linux developers. This is quickly changing also.
One of the big things is that video drivers for linux are not as mature and often lack power saving options or have power saving options that are inferior to the windows driver, again from lack of focus.
I currently have a dell E1505 and a thinkpad t61. The dell has an ATI x1400 and that is the main issue for battery life. It does have some power management options but they are poorly implemented in the linux drivers(both binary and open source). The thinkpad on the other hand has an intel video chip and is very close in battery life to windows AFTER I tweaked a bunch of things like swappiness to avoid hitting the hard drive for cache a lot and a number of other things.
I have been running NetBSD 4.0.1 on my EEE PC 900 for a few weeks now. While it does not have the out-of-the-box bells and whistles that come with most Linux distributions or windows, it is very lightweight (my base memory usage running the GENERIC_LAPTOP kernel, X, OpenMotif, and CMUCL is just 70 MB). I/O is a bit slow, but I suspect that I can iron that out with some tuning.
Most of the software that a nerd would need is available in the pkgsrc tree. I for one just use it for programming and InfoSec work, and it works just fine for me.
There are some gaps, though, namely a lack of "point and click" power management and wifi administration tools. Once you find and learn the commands, however, its not so bad.
Caveats:
You will need to use the "atheee.patch" patch in order to get the system to see the wifi interface.
I have not yet got the X server to run in 1024x600 mode, it runs in 800x600. I spend most of my time in console mode, though, and have not really had any driving need to sit down and get X running properly. I suspect that it won't be too difficult.
The EEE PC 900 seems to compile things slower than its CPU clock would suggest. Building kernels can take about 10 minutes and GHC took the better part of an evening to compile and bootstrap. I suspect that this is due to slow I/O to and from the disk.