Linux for an Old Laptop

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers this time i'm going to check out the best linux distros to run on older laptops or indeed on any computer with a lower end hardware specification in particular we're going to see if we can get a linux distro and modern litex distro to run on this epc 901 which i got in 2008 which is now 12 years old it's got a single core 1.6 gigahertz atom processor and one gigabyte of memory and my logic is if we can get a modern linux distro to run on this hardware then it should be a good cancer to run on all kinds of older computers so let's go and get started right here we have the epc 901 which we're using as our test hardware which on one side has a kensington lock an ethernet port one usb 2 port and jax for a headphone and microphone and then on the other side it's got an sd card slot two more usb 2 ports a vj socket and a power socket and this is the full connectivity available on this device there's no connectivity at the back which means that to record this computer for the video to record the screen i've got a little challenge i'm going to have to use a device like one of these this is a star tech device which takes vga in and gives us hdmi out it's actually got a scalar and a frame buffering as well which is quite a nifty piece of kit so i'm going to have to connect this to the epc plug it into my mixer plug it into my hdmi recorder but even so there will be occasions in this video where i can't record the screen directly but i have to record the screen on usually for the expanded computer's video by physically pointing a camera at the screen anyway with my technical challenges pointed out let's set up this computer like that give you a shot of the screen and we'll boot the computer up show you what it's running at the moment and to remind you this is a machine with a 1.6 gigahertz single core atom processor and one gigabyte of memory and it's currently running as you can see windows xp and it's got a display with a resolution of 1024x600 which might give us some display resolution issues with the linux distros we're testing and it's also important to note that the epc901 only has an eight gigabyte ssd so we've not got a lot of space to install our lightweight linux distros anyway here we are arriving in windows xp or i've not seen this for quite some time and the issue with windows xp these days because it's a non-supported operating system you'll get messages like this telling you it's a non-supported operating system there we are and in fact if we go into the anti-virus thing there it'll tell us even more so when it comes up it's struggling a bit isn't it oh look support for this operating system has ended we will need to put a new operating system on this device so it's now time for us to choose some lightweight linux distros right in this video i'm going to show you ubuntu 18.04 32-bit bionic pup 32 and zorin os 15.3 light 32 bit these are the best lightweight linux distros i've tested and will run on a computer with 512 megabytes of ram or more there's also another very nice lightweight linux distro called peppermint os which you can download from peppermintos.com although this requires at least one gigabyte of memory and i may cover it separately in another video back with the list we're going to be looking at here you may be wondering why all of our test distros are 32-bit and partly this is because our test hardware has got a 32-bit atom processor so cannot run a 64-bit operating system since about 2008 most computers have come with a 64-bit processor that can run either 32 or 64-bit software and so today it really should be possible to install the 64-bit linux distro on any computer manufactured in the past 10 years however i would still recommend installing a 32-bit operating system on any hardware that has got 2 gigabytes of ram or less as this will give better performance the only real downside for opting for 32-bit is that the distro support will be time limited for example all 32-bit linux distros based on ubuntu will cease to receive updates and support from april 2023 but that is over two years away so there's no reason not to install a 32-bit distro right now in order to get a bit more life out of an older computer right let's start with luboon2 which is a lightweight version of ubuntu which you can download from luboon2.net here as already noted i'll be trying out my latest 32-bit version and as with the other distros once i've downloaded an iso file i'll be writing it to a usb drive using belater etcher which you can obtain from berliner.io forward slash etcher in etcher all we need to do is to select an iso file on our usb drive and then click on flash note that writing an operating system to a usb drive will delete all data on it and that you'll need a drive at least four gigabyte in capacity now if we boot the epc with our ubuntu usb which here i can do from this boot menu you might have to go into your bios to select the way to boot from usb drive you can learn more about that in my pc bios settings videos but here i can boot like that from the usb drive and we first of all get to a menu where we select a language and then we get to a menu here where we've got various options to install ubuntu check for defects things like that and unfortunately there isn't an option here to test ubuntu directly from the usb drive but earlier i went through the full install process and so if we switch off the computer like that and remove the usb drive from the side of it like that i can boot up again and we will boot into ubuntu on the pc's ssd it wants a password nice simple password for a test setup there we are we should be able to log in now and here we are on with ubuntu desktop where if i do this we're now directly recording the computer's display output and this is a nice fully functional version of linux i've had no problems at all getting my trackpad to work it worked straight away i got onto wi-fi without any problems at all i've had no issues with the display resolution of the panel on the epc and if you go down to the menu you'll see there's a reasonable number of things here we've got accessories there let's bring up for example the farm manager i want to do that to show you that in the farm monitor look we've got about 4.1 gigabytes free on the 8 gigabyte drive on the pc so ubuntu really is very lightweight taking less than 4 gigabytes for its install with the software which installs with the operating system which is a very good uh what have we got in terms of that software we've got graphics here we've got a pdf viewer scanning program little paint package which is a nice to have we could go and maybe flood fill that with red that's exciting isn't it you can see the paint program works we can do that just shut it down uh we want to lose the changes yes we do we won't keep that i think the world can lose that fantastic image under internet we've got the firefox web browser we'll play that in a second and the internet messaging things like that under office we've got a spreadsheet with a genuric spreadsheet which comes up pretty quickly that's not too bad we've got the abbey word word processor let's launch that as well wordpress twin spreadsheet at the same time that's exciting isn't it there they are both running and let's go now into for example system tools and look at the task manager which will show us the resources being used well you will see it's pretty impressive if we go over here there's about 170 megabytes of memory being used of our one gigabyte of ram which is pretty good for an operating system word processor and spreadsheet all to be running so this really is a very lightweight system and straight away you can see you could use ubuntu with this install to get on with some useful work on older hardware understanding video i missed out there's various things for playing back audio as you would guess there are preferences here obviously for changing things around but i'm sure some of you want to see what happens if we launch a web browser so we'll launch firefox and it's worth noting that running a modern web browser on low-end hardware like this on older hardware is tricky and which is nothing to do with ubuntu it's just the fact that modern web browsers require a lot of memory and a lot of processor power to render the pages and it therefore means browsing is going to be limited on older hardware regardless of what operating system you install but to hear oh look we've got to an explaining computer's web page it has worked can we navigate around it looks like we can so you could do light web browsing on this system no problems at all let's uh scroll down and we'll try and go to youtube which is going to be a far more complicated site to render and explaining computers i think this will challenge the system quite a bit but we'll have a go in the name of experimentation and stuff like that we certainly aren't going to be playing high definition youtube content oh look a web page is slowing down your browser what do we want to do we want to wait and see if it'll work that's what we want to do and uh let's see how long it takes let's keep this going in real time just to see what it's like browsing on the older hub but we've got the message again but now i think something's coming up this is what happens when you browse the internet on the 12 year old hardware we've got the video there at the front the channel trailer hopefully come up in a second is it there it is there we are let's see if we can please show us a video youtube we'd love to see it there it is look let's bring it up let's try and force oh yes it's got it's picked up full screen didn't it just having a think and we'll check what resolution it's in i think my channel trailer is only in 720p i don't know why i must do a new one but uh come on show us show us a little menu go on just for us all the attention is killing us oh we have 480p so 480p that's that should play reasonably i would hope let us see it's struggling a bit isn't it yes it's sort of working isn't it and um things are going on so there we are i think we've proved you could use ubuntu on 12 year old hardware a computer with one gig of memory and a single core 1.6 gigahertz processor you could use it to do word processing and spreadsheets stuff like that a bit of light web browsing and even a little bit of video playback at 480. next we're taking a look at bionic pup 32 which is one of the family of very lightweight linux distros you can download from puppylinux.com and here the install iso is a mere 280 megabytes and it's running very nicely here from a usb drive i'm testing it out from usb i haven't installed it on the epc but it's still running very nicely indeed and it's very friendly distro it's nice to use this we just run up the task manager i'll show you what it really is very very very efficient you'll see it's only using 93 megabytes of the gigabyte we have idling along here running with task manager that's extraordinary that's less than a tenth of what you're using in a modern mainstream operating system and we've got a similar sort of bits of applications installed we found in ubuntu we've got the same a spreadsheet here the spreadsheet is due numeric as we saw previously comes up nice and quickly this is running off the usb 2 drive we've got the abbey word word processor again again it'll run up pretty fast so if you wanted to use a piece of hardware here the epc for taking notes and spreadsheets this would be perfectly good running bionic and if we go over to the menu you'll see there's actually lots and lots of applications and settings here we can look at it's amazing how much they packed into that 280 megabyte iso all sorts of things the inkscape vector graphics packages here already pre-installed lots and lots of things we can play with and there's even some fun stuff like sudoku and the jigsaw puzzle program and a rubik's cube puzzle solver but i'm sure the thing you'd like to see is the web browser given what we saw with ubuntu and how it wasn't brilliant web browser performance and here the default browser is the light web browser which of course is a lighter web browser than something like firefox or chrome or chromium and it's loaded in explaining computers very quickly it hasn't rendered it properly in terms of the menu that might be my fault in terms of the coding i guess but uh let's just go down to the bottom of this does it navigate we should check should we just can we do that sbc page like last time yes loading in very responsively really really really nicely indeed almost lost my mouse pointer there there we are let's go down there and what i want now i want to do is go back to youtube see what this makes of loading in a complicated site like youtube we're using a lighter browser which is faster but will it render things okay we shall soon see and all look like last time with lubuntu we've got a message saying things are taking a while and i think we'll speed on through in this instance until the youtube page has loaded and here we are after a minute or so youtube has loaded up no problems at all it started to play the the channel trailer i should say i had no issues at all with this puppy distro getting my wi-fi to work getting the keyboard to work getting the trackpad to work everything worked absolutely fine let's see if it'll go full screen for us please go full screen for us we'd love to see it always having a thing isn't it yes and it's it's working i think much better what's the resolution we're going to see things in will be good to try let's set 480p because sometimes these uh programmers do their own thing and that's not good let's see what's that going to do let it play and um this is clearly much better playback than we saw in the ubuntu in firefox this is perfectly usable this is really good we're proving here if you use bionic pop32 as your lightweight linux distro you can get on with not only things like word processing and spreadsheets but some quite decent browser activities and web browsing including some decent video playback finally let's look at zorin os 15.3 lite which is intended to bring new life to old pcs and can be downloaded from the s.com website like bionic pup 32 this can be tested by running it directly from a usb drive although here i've done a full install which works perfectly with the epc's 1024x600 display although for recording purposes i need to show you xyron os running on the epc looking like this which is running in a 800 by 600 resolution and i think as you can see straight away zone os is a very professional looking operating system probably the most professional looking of the three we've looked at here got a really nice look and feel things come up but very nicely indeed let's bring up the file manager and one of the first things we see here is the amount of free space is very small it's a 213 megabytes on our eight gigabyte drive so zorino s is about twice the size of installing ubuntu significantly more than installing a bionic pop32 so it is a lightweight operating system requiring about eight gigabytes of dry space is not massive these days but zorro s light is certainly a heavier operating system than the ones we've just been looking at and in fact we can prove that if we also go down to system here and we go into the task manager to see how much memory is being used come up here in a second there we are you'll see we're running with about 39 of our memory used that's about 400 megabytes a lot more than we were using in the other operating systems just idling along in terms of software we have a lot pre-installed various accessories here as you can see lots and things are down there in the menu we've got games there what's got in games there's various things solitaire things like that sudoku in under graphics we've got install the gmu image manipulation program very significantly bigger program we find in the other packages here which had smaller paint programs under internet we've got firefox and thunderbird we'll have a look at firefox in a second under multimedia various things for a playing video and the cheese webcam application up there as well under office we have here not something like abbey word a cut down word processor but we've got the full install of libreoffice so let's just run up libreoffice writer this is clearly going to be significantly heavier than things we've seen previously it'll take a while to come up but it will come up eventually come on let's load libreoffice writer it's having a think there it is almost there give us the icons you can do it we've got to encourage it let's all encourage it to show the icons please put them on the screen there they are we've got into libreoffice writer so as you can see you're getting more traditional mainstream software here but it's taking longer to run up that's the cost if we just do go to the internet we'll go across to a firefox you know what's going to happen running firefox in this system is going to be tricky it's a fairly heavy modern browser running on the system which is using more resources anyway i should note that zorino west light is specified to run in 512 megabytes of ram which it does but i think it's really an operating system requires probably a couple of gigabytes of memory to function really well we've got to scale down our display here to fit explaining computers on the screen but as you can see it got to the web page we can hopefully go to something like an sbc page there can we go to that page again it's taking a bit longer it's not as responsive as we've seen previously it's going to get there eventually you see even even rendering the images there took a bit of time to bring them in and we'll try to get to youtube i don't think we're even going to really manage it but we'll have a go you you get the message i think here zoranos light is really i think a light version of a heavy operating system rather than being like a bionic pop 32 or ubuntu which are very much lightweight operating systems from the ground up so as zone os tries to get into youtube we're seeing the same message we saw here in ubuntu i think my comments would be that on the epc what i'm going to install and they've installed is going to be bionic pup 32 but there's no doubt at all if you want the most professional looking and feeling light operating system it's worth taking a look at the zorin os light very often in the comments on this channel viewers report how they brought old laptops and other computers back into use by installing a lightweight linux distro and if this is something you're interested in but i hope you found the information in this video to be useful if you have you may also be interested in my forthcoming series here on the channel about upgrading old desktop pcs but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed what you see there please press that like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and i hope to talk to you again very soon you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 286,050

Rating: 4.9563565 out of 5

Keywords: Lightweight Linux, Linux for old computer, Linux for old laptop, Lubuntu, Zorin OS, Zorin OS Lite, Puppy Linux, Bionic Pup, BionicPup, Bionic Puppy, Peppermit OS, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt, Eee PC, EeePC, Eee PC 901, Linux for netbook

Id: aJcWcQ8ew6Q

Length: 20min 57sec (1257 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 10 2021