Best Linux Distro for old Laptop???
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@clyde Yeah.... Unfortunately the bigger hurdle in my life right now than my ancient, half-working tech is my extremely limited income. If I had 8 bucks for a USB card reader, I'd probably have 60 bucks for a Pi 3. :) and/or :(
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Alternatively, if you wanted to keep Windows 10 for some reason, if you look in the options for something along the lines of a "Refresh Install" this will essentially re-install Windows 10. I find that if you upgrade from another OS to Windows 10, it leaves behind alot of garbage in an attempt to provide you with all your old settings and applications, which in turn slows things down immensely.
If you are installing fresh to Windows 10, and it's still running poor, then I guess you're SOL and better off going back to Windows 7, or linux as you're requesting.
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LXLE
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@kookamunga said in Best Linux Distro for old Laptop???:
Alternatively, if you wanted to keep Windows 10 for some reason, if you look in the options for something along the lines of a "Refresh Install" this will essentially re-install Windows 10. I find that if you upgrade from another OS to Windows 10, it leaves behind alot of garbage in an attempt to provide you with all your old settings and applications, which in turn slows things down immensely.
If you are installing fresh to Windows 10, and it's still running poor, then I guess you're SOL and better off going back to Windows 7, or linux as you're requesting.
No way I was trying Win10 on that laptop again. The performance was so poor on it that it would take a few minutes before I could get to any websites after the OS was completely started. You couldn't even watch any videos in Media Player, let alone on youtube or anywhere else. Even email was such a chore to try using that I considered the laptop to be bricked after upgrading it.
I went with my old Win7 install and it worked as good as it ever did, which isn't saying all that much. It was an x64 system, but only has 3GB of memory and a single core processor. It came with Win7, but it never really was all that impressive.
I now have a dual boot setup of Win7 and Lubuntu on it and it works pretty damn great now for what it is. I was just watching some podcasts on it yesterday while I had my main PC really tied up with some intensive archiving stuff that required me to keep my web browsers closed to conserve memory.
Thanks for the tip, but there was no way I was going to try putting Win10 back on there. :)
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I think I figured out my storage problem with these images... at least temporarily until I can actually shrink them.
I never knew how good 7-zip was for archival purposes until the last few days. I'm in the process of slowly zipping up everything that I don't use on a regular basis and saving tons of space.
For instance, I have 6 versions of the RetroPie images here. 4.2, 4.3 and 4.4 for both Pi 1/0 and Pi 2/3.
retropie-4.2-rpi1_zero.img.gz is 616,781kb. Unzipped, it's 2.1GB. I zipped it with 7-zip and it's only 391,799kb. 4.4.gz is 701,289kb and 7-zipped it's only 450,687kb.
From how I've seen it handle things like large over-dumped roms, I believe all blank space should be essentially "removed" when I 7-zip them on top of this great compression. I occasionally needed to reference these older images and grab things here and there while working on my current 4.3 Pi Zero image, but I think I'm done with that for now and likely won't need to use them that often in the future.
I'm not sure how much space I actually used on the 32GB images before backing them up, but I'm hoping to at least shrink them to 16GB if not 12 or less. This should be a fine solution, at least for these RP images that I don't intend to ever duplicate on another SD card.
Gonna have to figure out a way to shrink the image I make that I will be doing that with at some point though. :)
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@used2berx Glad to hear that you've found a solution for at least the existing images.
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@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.
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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!!!!!!!!
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@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.
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@used2berx See https://retropie.org.uk/download/#Installing_on_top_of_an_existing_OS for more information.
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@mitu Does retropie work with Knoppix?
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@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 ?
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@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.
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@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.
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@mitu Nice. I've got 18.04. I'll update this thread when I get a chance to try it out.
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@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.
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@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.
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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.
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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!
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@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.
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