Best Linux Distro for old Laptop???

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.

Clyde

@used2berx Have fun finding "your" Linux distribution, and don't forget to make Backups (not only) before doing supposedly safe tweaks. ;)

meleu

@Used2BeRX
I didn't read all the suggestions above, but would like to share my personal experience.

I have many RL friends that see me as "the tech guy" and come to me commenting/complaining that their computers are laggy and stuff.

Most likely the conversation goes this way:

me- What OS are you using?
friend- Windows 7/8/10
me - Really important question: Do you use AutoCAD, or video editing software, or some of very specific software (like those tools to create RetroAchievements :P )?
friend - Nop. I basically use it to browse the web. Maybe Word/Excel from time to time...

With this usecase and with a configuration like yours:

3GB ram (probably DDR2, doubtfully DDR3)
AMD Athlon 1600Mhz single core, x64 based

I would instantaneously install Linux Mint MATE edition as the only OS (NO DUAL BOOT).

Trust me, as a Linux enthusiast I tried a bunch of distributions. And I came to the conclusion that Linux Mint has the most comfortable look&feel for users with a MS Windows background.

The MATE edition seems to be the best choice for your specs. Some people may say that the XFCE edition is lighter, but I tested both and didn't see any difference performance-wise. Then I choose MATE because it seems to be more comfortable for Windows users.

I installed it for 5 or 6 friends and all of them are very happy with it. Even my mother-in-law, an over 60 years old lady, use Linux Mint with no issues. All of them say stuff like "Wow! I didn't know my computer was that fast!".

Then, that's my suggestion: Linux Mint MATE edition.

Used2BeRX

I installed a minimal Lubuntu distro and added the following additional software packages:

Ubuntu Cloud Image (instance)
DNS Server
LAMP Server
Lubuntu Desktop
PostgreSQL Database
OpenSSH server
Basic Ubuntu Server

Immediately after installing the RP/ES image and updating everything but the kernel, I tried Super Mario 64 and without even tweaking any of the Video/Audio settings I saw marked improvement. After changing Video to dispmax, Audio to alsa-thread and putting the Render Resolution to 320x240 I have it running at nearly 100% with no audio stutter at all. :)

I'm still trying to get Lunar on the PSX running good. I realized that I don't have the BIOS in the folder yet, so that's the first thing I'm going to do. Hopefully I have some good news there to report as well.

mitu

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

After changing Video to dispmax

There is no dispmanx outside the PI hardware, it's a specific Broadcom API for the VC4 GPU found on the Pi.

Used2BeRX

@mitu Strange. Changing PSX to dispmax won't allow me to load any PSX games at all. Doesn't stop me from loading N64 games though. Must be coded different for each system, huh? Just ignores the bad command in N64, but hangs up the PSX?

BTW... this is what I was looking for: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/12037/building-on-ubuntu-server-16-04/27

I'm assuming I must not have been clear on what I was trying to do since you were pretty actively posting in that thread. :)

Used2BeRX

I think I've learned more about Linux in the last 3 days than I have in my entire life.

Who knows how to edit, save and exit Vim now? This guy. :)

I borked the instructions that @johnodon had in the other thread to boot directly into EmulationStation without a GUI and with an autologin on your ID by missing a single "/" in one of the echo commands. So when I booted Lubuntu up, shortly after the splash screen it would just be a blank screen with a cursor at the top and nothing would ever happen. In Lubuntu recovery I found the file, but I wasn't able to edit it with sudo permissions in either Vim or Nano and I was getting an error 128. I rebooted into recovery and chose the option that re-mounts the drives with read/write permissions and then I was able to add that character and save it. As soon as I did, I rebooted and it went right into EmulationStation. :)

Controllers didn't work though... I had done all of his instructions except to install RetroPie because it was already installed. I'm in the process of doing another Basic Install and I hope that fixes the problem. I double and triple checked the rest of his instructions against my results and I couldn't find anything else that I did wrong.

Fingers crossed.

Used2BeRX

@meleu Hey bud. I don't know how I missed your reply until just now. Sorry about that. Hope you've been doing well.

Just curious... why do you specify "No Dual Boot" in bold and caps? Sounds like it's more than just personal preference. :)

My desire for this thing has evolved a bit over the last week. What I'm trying to do now is a minimal Lubuntu install without the GUI that I can boot directly into EmulationStation like we do with the Pi. I can't believe that I'm not getting better performance out of the PSX and N64 emulators, and I suspect it may have to do with the overhead of a GUI environment that it's forced to run over with a standard install.

I had set this up initially with the Lubuntu GUI installed, but then I forced it to run in runlevel 3 so the GUI didn't start, I then followed all the instructions here: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/12037/building-on-ubuntu-server-16-04/28

But since it wasn't technically a minimal install with the extra software packages I had already added, and I also had installed RetroPie before doing any of those steps, something went terribly wrong and the joystick and keyboard were completely non-responsive once it would load into ES, forcing me to do a hard power down to even get out. Nothing I tried fixed this, including deleting all controller configs and removing and then re-installing all of the driver packages in RetroPie setup.

This is really exciting, even though I haven't quite figured it out yet. It was a letdown that I've spent the last couple of hours unsuccessfully trying to get those controllers to work, but man... when I got the system to automatically log me in and then boot directly into ES, that was awesome.

Here's hoping all this work pays off and I can play some PSX and N64 on this thing when I'm all done.

I'll probably nuke the Windows 7 install after that and replace it with your MINT suggestion. I'm feeling pretty comfortable with Linux now and I think it might be time to take the training wheels off this laptop. :)

Clyde

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

Who knows how to edit, save and exit Vim now? This guy. :)

Kudos for that. I never got comfortable with vim in my nearly 12 years of Linux, and I don't think that I have to. I prefer nano on the console and graphical editors on desktops. Fortunately, Linux is all about free choice. :)

dankcushions

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

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.

the lr-pcsx emulator used by default on RPI is optimized for ARM for both the cpu dynarec and the software renderer. which psx emulator are you using on your laptop? the psx emulator used by default on x86 (i think) is lr-beetlepsx, which is a lot less performant, but a better emulator. it uses a GL renderer, so it relies on your graphics card.

meleu

@Used2BeRX yo dude!

I'm glad to see you tweaking your Linux and looks like you're learning a lot in the process! :D

Well, for your use case (build a retrogaming station laptop), maybe Linux Mint isn't the best choice...

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

Just curious... why do you specify "No Dual Boot" in bold and caps? Sounds like it's more than just personal preference. :)

yeah, it's not just personal preference. But a personal experience of being "the tech guy" for my RL buddies.

I'm emphasizing NO DUAL BOOT because all the times I installed Linux and Windows (dual boot) for my friends they use Linux 1 or 2 times for curiosity and then go to Windows to do their "real work". In the end they realize that they are still unsatisfied with their computer's performance and kinda blaming it on the fact they are wasting half of their hard disks with an unused Linux distribution.

When I install only Linux for them, they have that short period of adaptation but after some minutes using the system for "real stuff", and not for just looking around, they realize that the system runs better than Windows on their computers.

As I said, I did it for 5 or 6 friends and not even a single person asked to remove Linux and put Windows back.

Used2BeRX

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

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

Who knows how to edit, save and exit Vim now? This guy. :)

Kudos for that. I never got comfortable with vim in my nearly 12 years of Linux, and I don't think that I have to. I prefer nano on the console and graphical editors on desktops. Fortunately, Linux is all about free choice. :)

Yeah... it's not great, but I'm sure it must have its uses. I've never seen a text editor with such a high barrier to entry before. I figured I should learn since I got stuck in there and I didn't want to do a hard reboot to get out of it.

@dankcushions

the lr-pcsx emulator used by default on RPI is optimized for ARM for both the cpu dynarec and the software renderer. which psx emulator are you using on your laptop? the psx emulator used by default on x86 (i think) is lr-beetlepsx, which is a lot less performant, but a better emulator. it uses a GL renderer, so it relies on your graphics card.

Wow. Great info. I honestly didn't know a single bit of that post before you said it.

I was doing most of my laptop testing on Rearmed because I have more ISO files than anything. I'll have to get more BIN/CUE files up to try out with rearmed. So... we don't have any non-libretro PSX emulators available to us? That would be a shame since the non libretro emulators were how I got a lot of games working on the Pi Zero at acceptable levels for SNES.

I had tried out Beetle on Symphony of the Night, but it was running pretty slow compared to Rearmed. Probably because the graphics chip on this laptop is a piece of junk. :)

Used2BeRX

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

@Used2BeRX yo dude!

I'm glad to see you tweaking your Linux and looks like you're learning a lot in the process! :D

Well, for your use case (build a retrogaming station laptop), maybe Linux Mint isn't the best choice...

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

Just curious... why do you specify "No Dual Boot" in bold and caps? Sounds like it's more than just personal preference. :)

yeah, it's not just personal preference. But a personal experience of being "the tech guy" for my RL buddies.

I'm emphasizing NO DUAL BOOT because all the times I installed Linux and Windows (dual boot) for my friends they use Linux 1 or 2 times for curiosity and then go to Windows to do their "real work". In the end they realize that they are still unsatisfied with their computer's performance and kinda blaming it on the fact they are wasting half of their hard disks with an unused Linux distribution.

When I install only Linux for them, they have that short period of adaptation but after some minutes using the system for "real stuff", and not for just looking around, they realize that the system runs better than Windows on their computers.

As I said, I did it for 5 or 6 friends and not even a single person asked to remove Linux and put Windows back.

Yeah man. This has actually been really fun and I can't believe that 4 days of this have gone by already. This is how I learn things though. 4 aborted attempts at college taught me that I'm only ever going to learn something if I'm interested in it. (BTW... not sure if you read anywhere else, but I've heavily modified your script on my own as well and it's doing a lot more stuff than it used to. That was a few weeks of learning stuff and a lot of trial and error too).

Ah.... Now I understand about the NO DUAL BOOT. For sure that's what would have ended up happening with me if I had both Windows and Linux on there and wasn't doing any emulation stuff there. Up until recently I thought I'd keep Windows just to be safe, but now that I know how to easily install and use gFTP I might just replace the Windows 7 install with Linux Mint MATE Edition.

My only concern is with the "Explorer". I generally do a LOT of tasks when it comes to moving, renaming, unzipping and archiving files with my work. Now this wouldn't be my primary work station, but I assume I'm going to start making this a bigger part of my work once it's all set up. I'm not sure right now how much of my problems with the Linux version of File Explorer are because I don't know what I'm doing yet, and how much of it is that Linux just won't do the things I'm used to doing, or doesn't do them in a way that's intuitive to me after a lifetime of using Windows based stuff.

I really wish I was able to eek one more hard drive partition on here so I didn't have to make that choice. But like you said, I'll be forced to learn if I take the training wheels off. ;)

BTW everybody. I did it. :)

I've got the latest 18.04 Minimal Lubuntu with only the openSSH server package running on here with the instructions that @johnodon put together in a post on this thread: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/12037/building-on-ubuntu-server-16-04/27 (His instructions said not to use anything newer than 17.10.1, but I can confirm that 18.04 is fine).

Things I did after his instructions (and intend to do):

I've set it up to auto-mount my "sandbox" partition by editing /etc/fsab. (I'm super glad I kept all of my media on a separate partition so I didn't have to waste half a day transferring stuff every time I nuked another install.)
Created Symbolic Links in terminal to link to my BIOS, roms, Media, and Gamelists folders on the Sandbox drive.
Only partially done... I've set the volume of the laptop speakers to 140% using pactl -- set-sink-volume. Next I'd like to figure out how to bind some keyboard keys to the volume function because now the only way to change the volume that I know of is to go into terminal and use this command again.

So now it loads right up into EmulationStation like our Pi setups do. It does an autologin on user pi, and all of my gamelist.xml files made with Meleu's script show all of my artwork and the proper game names and information, just like it did on the Pi. :)

I wish I knew more about benchmarking and stuff and had the foresight to do some before tests so I could offer more than anecdotal evidence, but it's very apparent on my end that this offered improvement over the performance before when RP/ES was installed over the GUI. My biggest indicator of this is that Super Mario 64 runs at just about 100% perfection now right out of the box without having to tweak anything in settings, particularly without having to downgrade the Render Resolution to only 320x240. I haven't seen much if any improvement in PSX emulation, but with the new information from @dankcushions above, I'm going to try a few more things out before I give up on it. It might be possible that my rig is just too crappy for good PSX emulation.

Interestingly enough, it doesn't behave like I thought it would when hitting F4. You go to a black screen, but there's a mouse pointer. with nothing at all else there. A right click offers you some choices, such as "Terminal emulator". I'm actually assuming that even with this minimal install that there is still a most extreme barebones GUI desktop environment going on in the background here. In one way that's a little sad because I ultimately didn't do what I aimed to do here, but at the same time I'm thinking I might still be able to now use this partition for things I didn't think I would before like gFTP instead of having to switch to a different partition to do any file transferring between testing stuff out.

Sorry for the long posts... I figure somebody somwhere might find this all at least somewhat interesting. :)

Used2BeRX

Well... it looks like PSX is probably a no-go for this laptop. I was hoping after what @dankcushions said about the difference between Beetle and Rearmed that I'd have better performance with Beetle, but the GPU on this thing must be pretty terrible since the performance in Beetle is absolutely terrible and the game speed is about half of what it should be or less (on Symphony of the Night). I'm actually very close to getting good performance out of Rearmed. The gameplay itself seems fine, but I can't seem to get rid of the audio stutter no matter what I do. Shame since everything else seems to be running so well now.

Oh well. This was still fun and now I've got another piece of equipment set up with RetroPie as a backup for my work and it greatly outperforms the Pi Zero in any case. :)