Best Linux Distro for old Laptop???

Clyde

@used2berx Glad to hear that you've found a solution for at least the existing images.

Kookamunga

@used2berx No worries, I still run on Windows 7 myself, and sometimes I peer into LXLE Linux to mess around. Just from experience with working with computers that family members have upgraded to Windows 10, refreshing the install seemed to alleviate most of the poor performance/weird issues I was experiencing on their computers.

Used2BeRX

Hey... so... kind of a related question here.

One of my buds was asking me if they wanted to set up RetroPie/EmulationStation on a laptop, what would I do?

I told them that I'd do what I'm doing right now and ask the pros. :)

It never dawned on me how useful that would be with my work on the Pi. I do a ton of things that tie up my Pi for many hours at a time. For instance, I was just running a script that finished this morning that took 31.5 hours to do on my Pi Zero. I think as crappy as this old laptop is that it would have been faster there and it wouldn't have kept me from doing anything else on my Pi for over an entire day too.

Is there perhaps any awesome images out there that have all of this set up that I could put on a bootable thumbdrive and install like these Linux distros? I have quite a lot of extra space left and I could create a 3rd bootable partition just for emulation.

THANKS!!!!!!!!

mitu

@used2berx said in Best Linux Distro for old Laptop???:

One of my buds was asking me if they wanted to set up RetroPie/EmulationStation on a laptop, what would I do?

Install a supported Linux distro and then you can install RetroPie on it. The list of is in the docs, but installing Ubuntu (or one of its derivatives) is a safe bet for a beginner.

Clyde

@used2berx See https://retropie.org.uk/download/#Installing_on_top_of_an_existing_OS for more information.

VictimRLSH

@mitu Does retropie work with Knoppix?

mitu

@victimrlsh Didn't try it, but it should work, since it's Debian based. But since Knoppix is a 'live' distro - there's no persistent installation. Do you want to have a portable installation ?

Used2BeRX

@mitu I wouldn't have a problem on Lubuntu, would I? Not a big deal if I have to install a new OS, but would be cool if I can just try it on the one I've already got. It took me a while to figure out how to get the Wi-Fi working on it. That kind of surprised me since the Pi Zero figured out my USB network stick immediately.

mitu

@used2berx said in Best Linux Distro for old Laptop???:

I wouldn't have a problem on Lubuntu, would I

If you're using the at least 16.04, I don't think so. If you search the forums, there's plenty of users installing RetroPie on Lubuntu. Get the lastest LTS (18.04) and it should work fine.

Used2BeRX

@mitu Nice. I've got 18.04. I'll update this thread when I get a chance to try it out.

VictimRLSH

@mitu That was the idea, something to cart around on a USB stick and use on other computers. You CAN install Knoppix, I have done so on many machines.

mitu

@victimrlsh said in Best Linux Distro for old Laptop???:

You CAN install Knoppix, I have done so on many machines.

Sure it can, but why don't install a normal distribution, which is more suited for this purpose ? As the Knoppix FAQ says:

Knoppix is based on the Debian "distro" of Linux, but it isn't Debian. Knoppix is a live DVD and is intended to run right from the DVD or from a flash drive after "Install KNOPPIX to flash disk".

Nowadays running a distro from an USB/removable drive is supported by all major distros - Raspbian itself runs from a SDHC card.

Used2BeRX

So far the laptop is outperforming the Pi Zero by quite a bit. :)

Star Fox and Super Mario RPG seem to run at or near 100%. Quake I and the two expansions will run with the biggest screen and all the video tweaks at 60fps without any lag in lr-tyrquake.

I've even managed to get decent emulation on Super Mario 64, although unless I can further tweak it I'd never play it there when I have other options like the XBox that play it at 100%.

The best thing is when I set everything up right, all of my configs and gamelist.xmls worked with the media I already had set up on the Pi Zero as well. I'm going to have to see if there is any way I can get the audio and video to output to my ancient projection screen TV. This still isn't as good as emulation on the XBox, but it's a lot better than the Pi Zero was.

Used2BeRX

So.... I was thinking.

Is there a way to boot directly into EmulationStation and completely bypass the Lubuntu load?

I know that there is an option to load directly into it, but does that mean that it loads Lubuntu first and then starts it automatically once Lubuntu is loaded? Or is this an EmulationStation load that has more resources available to it?

If that's possible, does anybody know how I could add an additional load option to the GRUB menu for that? So I could have options to load into Win7, Lubuntu or EmulationStation direct?

I was hoping this would be possible and maybe I could get PSX and N64 running better this way.

Thanks!

mitu

@used2berx said in Best Linux Distro for old Laptop???:

If that's possible, does anybody know how I could add an additional load option to the GRUB menu for that? So I could have options to load into Win7, Lubuntu or EmulationStation direct?

No, it's not possible.

Used2BeRX

@mitu

Okay. Is there a better option than Lubuntu? What I mean is, what is the absolute minimum Linux build out there that I could run the latest RetroPie setup on?

mitu

@used2berx I thought that Lubuntu is pretty minimal - it has a good balance between minimalism and usability. The absolute minimum is the pi, but you already got that.

Used2BeRX

@mitu lol.. yeah. The Pi Zero is pretty minimal.

What I mean is what would be the absolute minimal Linux distro that I could install on my laptop and then put EmulationStation on top of it? All of the options I see out there load into a GUI desktop first, and I can't help but think that there are a lot of resources being wasted before EmulationStation is even started up because of that. Is there a text based Linux distro out there that would use barely any resources. Something similar to the good old days of DOS?

I'm a bit disappointed with the performance of my laptop with PSX and N64 games. Given the specs of the laptop, I would have figured that it should at least perform as well as the Pi 3 does, but that's just not the case. I think that the choice of Linux OS I have installed is the reason for this.

Used2BeRX

I tried changing my runlevel to 3 following instructions here: http://chousensha.github.io/blog/2018/02/08/lfcs-prep-runlevels-and-bootloader-configuration/

This actually seemed to be what I was looking for, but after I did that I got an SDL error whenever I tried running emulationstation:

lvl0: Error initializing SDL!
(I don't remember what it said here.  It was something about "Video")
lvl0: Renderer failed to initialize!
lvl0: Window failed to initialize!

Changing back to runlevel 5 and everything works as it did before.

Back to square one, I guess.

Used2BeRX

Well I've totally screwed up my Lubuntu install now by doing some tweaks that were supposedly safe. Guess I'll use this opportunity to try out other distros and see if I can come up with something better.