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vigmeister writes "I hopped on the netbook bandwagon early this year in a rather odd fashion by picking up an outdated portable tablet (Fujitsu P1510) which just about matches the latest, greatest netbooks for their performance and portability features, while nipping them by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 So, my questions are: What OS would you recommend for a netbook/outdated laptop?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 If you are still using your outdated laptops/tablets productively, please share with us how you're doing it, so we can too."

Comments

Something *nix, for sure

[ohxten]

Try a *nix -- maybe something like FreeBSD, NetBSD, or OpenBSD.

Re:Something *nix, for sure

[Tubal-Cain]

Apparently, you meant to say "say".

Are you kidding?

[HateBreeder]

You're naively asking for an OS recommendation on Slashdot?

talk about predictability of results...

Re:Are you kidding?

[Aminion]

Yeah, all the Windows ME fanboism is getting really old.

Re:Are you kidding?

[Foofoobar]

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with 'religiously' should not impair your ability as an engineer to agree that it makes a better choice for a lowend outdated machine. Attempting to fit a modern, bloated OS with poor security and modern drivers requirements to an outdated machine is not only dumb but childish in assuming that one OS fits all.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.

Re:Are you kidding?

[MimsyBoro]

Yeah, The question should be something like "Which flavour of Ubuntu would you recommend?" And maybe you'll get one "no but Fedora is also cool" but don't count on it.

Re:Are you kidding?

[pablomme]

Let me introduce you to PowerTOP. Come back after you try it.

Re:Are you kidding?

[poetmatt]

If you think that anything other than linux is the most power efficient, I'd like to not only point you to the responses below but also let you know that you have it pretty much backwards. Linux distros can not only be more efficient but can even be specifically aimed to be even moreso on top of that. PowerTOP was my first thought, as well.

I mean what do you want to point people to? OSX? Vista? Lets be honest now. Try not to throw chairs next time.

Re:Are you kidding?

[PC and Sony Fanboy]

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)...

Re:Are you kidding?

[RiotingPacifist]

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))

Re:Are you kidding?

[level_headed_midwest]

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.

Re:Are you kidding?

[Z34107]

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.

Re:Are you kidding?

[i.of.the.storm]

Ah, WinFLP=Windows for Legacy PCs. For those too lazy to google it themselves.

Re:Are you kidding?

[calmofthestorm]

Really? I prefer linux myself, but ME definitely holds the edge for stability, security, and user experience.

If I were a power user I'd consider upgrading my linux to genuine windows, but us casual users can get by with a lighter experience.

Re:Are you kidding?

[Z34107]

Sure, I can try explaining a little bit. And those "RTFA" posts are definitely not helpful; it was a pain for me (in my infinite wisdom, of course) to get EWF installed and working correctly, and I had step-by-step instructions.

These are from the Aspire One User forums, but these instructions work for most any Windows computer. The short of it is to get EWF drivers, you have to download an XP Embedded ISO image from Microsoft and rip apart an installer. Installing the drivers requires installing some very specific registry keys and running a command-line instruction from the CD you downloaded. After a reboot, you're running with EWF.

What EWF does exactly is it makes a specific drive, say C, "read-only." Any writes to your C drive with EWF enabled (in RAM-Reg mode, or whatever it's called) are trapped in memory instead. Reads to changed files are read from memory.

So, you have a slowly enlarging cache of changed files; it's pretty much the NTFS journal stored in RAM instead of committed to disk. This means if you save a file to your C drive, it appears to be saved (because Windows is reading that part of the file system from memory) but it's gone when you reboot. (So, have a second "save" partition.) You can enable/disable the Enhanced Write Filter at any time if, say, you need to install a patch or a program.

It's pretty fun; you can delete all of the icons on your desktop and everything you can out of your Windows drive and, because those changes were never committed to disk, only temporarily stored in memory, everything's back as it was when you reboot. It can also be dangerous - don't defrag or chkdsk or anything silly like that with it enabled, because all available memory will fill up and then you'll get "delayed write" errors and Windows will hardlock.

Also, turn off your paging file if you install EWF drivers. There is no point in caching memory to disk if any changes to disk are being cached in memory.

It pretty much freezes your computer eternally in one state - it functions as normal, except changes to a EWF protected drive only appear to be saved. You'd want to do this because, well, everything runs much faster. Take Outlook 2007 - you run it, it loads your PST file and makes changes to it. That PST file is now cached in memory, and any further access to it is memory-fast instead of disk-fast. Programs load a lot faster, and the machine boots a lot faster. It acts like a much faster laptop than it is because the disk is used only for reads, and never for any subsequent writes.

The reason it's in an XP Embedded CD is because it's designed to let you run Windows off of a CD or a non-writeable flash card. It's also very handy for saving your solid-state drive from burning out because of the million+ writes per second Windows feels compelled to do.

It's a pain to get working, but you'll know it's working when 1) your computer runs faster and 2) any new icons you make on your desktop (assuming you "Froze" your C drive) disappear when you reboot.

Oddly enough, it's kinda like Vista's Super-Fetch.

Best OS?

[ROMRIX]

Why don't you just say what you mean. 'What flavor of linux?'

That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[David Gerard]

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.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[David Gerard]

Oh, and the critical factor for battery life? Run a recent Linux. And use PowerTop to check what's taking power, and disable it. Linux is getting REALLY GOOD at this stuff. On my Compaq 6710b (Core 2 Duo, 1GB RAM) doing lots of browsing in Firefox 3 with hundreds of tabs and almost nothing else, Windows XP runs 2 hours, Kubuntu 7.10 ran 3 hours, Kubuntu 8.04 runs 3.5 to 4 hours. Your mileage may vary, of course - but the most up-to-date Linux kernel is well worth it.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[lysergic.acid]

in reply to both of your comments:

this is why i think vendors need to create a category of lower power computers--not just laptops/subnotebooks/tablets. the average user is not using their desktop PC for CAD work, 3d/graphic design, video editing, or playing the latest FPS. most people simply need a computer that can efficiently surf the web, check their e-mail, do spreadsheets/word processing/presentations, play music, and watch the occasional DVD.

instead of developing more and more bloated software that negate simultaneous increases in hardware processing power/speed, we should be making software more efficient so that casual computing can be done on cheaper and cheaper systems that require less power & energy rather than more.

the average user should be able to accomplish everything they need to do using a 700-800 MHz low-power processor with 256 MB of RAM. they'd not only save on their electric bill, but we'd be creating a more sustainable society. besides, unlike the PC gamer, media/graphic design professional, the casual computer user shouldn't need to upgrade their hardware every single year to keep up with increasing resource intensive software.

using a simple & efficient OS tailored to the casual computing, the average consumer could use a cheaper, less powerful machine that still boots up in seconds. but that would require that PC vendors stop pre-installing their systems with cruftware by their software partners.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[cyber-vandal]

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.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[lysergic.acid]

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.

If you're going with linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

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've got one of these!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

options

[itzdandy]

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.

Re:options

[Svartalf]

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.

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?

Underpowered tablet you say?

[Caboosian]

Clearly the territory of Windows Vista.

Re:Stay where you are

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're happy with XP Tablet, why change?

"Me too"

Stick with XP if you're happy. Fiddle with *nix on a desktop.

Naysayers aside, I get ~7 hours of active use on my Lenovo Thinkpad x61 tablet and still have 10% left. This is with the stock 9 cell battery, wifi off and the backlight dialed down to one step above off - perfectly readable indoors.

How do I get better numbers than the vendor claims? I've tweaked the OS, bumped the ram to 4GB and save my data to an SD card in the built in reader - no need to spin the HD up and down every time I hit save. Opening and closing the lid sleeps it just fine and it gets me through a 5 class day without needing to carry the AC brick.

What wondrous OS is this? Vista Business. Yep, Vista. It works, and I have other machines (that I don't really use anymore) if I want to fiddle.

SSD or Compact Flash?

[niko9]

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.)

Ubuntu w/Netbook Remix

[Neil Jansen]

Ubuntu 8.x with Netbook Remix interface installed. The desktop interface is touchscreen friendly. Window-picker applet and Maximus do a great job of saving you screen real-estate.

Re:Ubuntu w/Netbook Remix

[Doug Neal]

Agreed, but probably best to wait for 8.10. 8.04 falls quite short in terms of hardware support for netbooks. It is possible to get them about 85% working with a lot of manual tweaking. 8.10's newer kernel works much better with netbook hardware, and the netbook remix packages are also much better integrated.

I also hear that Fedora 10 works nicely with netbooks, if that's your thing.. personally I much prefer something Debian based.

Puppy

[Trenchbroom]

Puppy linux. Running it right now on my eeepc 2g surf--800 Celeron with 512 MB. Works great!

Linux or Windows?

[malevolentjelly]

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. ;)

Re:Linux or Windows?

[Creepy Crawler]

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'm using a P1510 right now

[wiredlogic]

I'm using a P1510 and I love it. I don't consider it underpowered at all as long as your goal isn't to run cutting edge games. It runs XP and Linux great. Fujitsu got the netbook concept right 3 years ago when everyone else was still making SUV notebooks. I transport it in a convenient, portable DVD player case.

The best feature is the ULV Pentium M which can be heavily undervolted to conserve battery life and reduce heat output. With the extended battery I can get 6+ hours running at 600MHz, 0.7V. For XP, set up NHC to configure the lower voltages. For Linux, use the PHCkernel patch to override the BIOS voltage settings and configure cpufreq for ondemand at all times.

This machine is quite usable with 512MB if you keep Windows lean on active processes. It gets better with the 1GB upgrade if you can find the memory. The only big problem with this machine is the obsolete connector for the 1.8" HD limits you to an 80GB max drive. If you're lucky you can snag a replacement cable for the newer P1620 (find a broken one cheap) that supports the newer ZIF connector.

If you are going the windows route ...

[phoxix]

Windows XP SP3 + nLite > Every other version of Windows.

It works with 99.999% of everything, and doesn't suck hard like Beasta

Use Puppy Linux

[biggaijin]

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.

Surprise: Vista will work

[djelovic]

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

FREEEEE

[Yeb]

http://freeeee.org/

FREEEEE - 100% Free Software GNU/Linux for Eee

I have an eeepc 900 and

[DanZ23]

I run Gentoo on it. I get 830 vs 450 fps in glxgears compared to the stock kernel and AsusLauncher/Xandros. I love this pc