{"id":830,"date":"2009-03-16T10:13:55","date_gmt":"2009-03-16T02:13:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/?p=830"},"modified":"2009-03-16T17:11:48","modified_gmt":"2009-03-16T09:11:48","slug":"laptop-for-kids","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/index.php\/2009\/03\/16\/laptop-for-kids\/","title":{"rendered":"Laptop for kids"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Heidi finally got a new laptop (<a href=\"http:\/\/h10025.www1.hp.com\/ewfrf\/wc\/product?lc=en&#038;dlc=&#038;cc=us&#038;lang=&#038;product=3827473\">Compaq CQ60 118TX<\/a>) on Friday, so I went about repurposing her old computer (<a href=\"http:\/\/ixbtlabs.com\/articles\/asuss1\/\">Asus S1300A<\/a>; Pentium3 1GHz, 128Mb RAM) for use by her niece and nephew.<\/p>\n<p>Given that she&#8217;s had the same install of Windows XP on it for&#8230; ever (2002), it&#8217;s been running insanely slowly. However, we figured it would be fine with a lightweight version of Linux. After all, the kids only really need a web-browser so that they can play flash games right?<\/p>\n<p>Anyhow, the tail-end of the story is that the machine is now running a clean recovery version of Windows XP (and currently downloading SP3). I tried a bunch of Linux distributions and they were either too memory or processor intensive (most commonly) or just too esoteric to hand over to someone else. Maybe I should have tried older versions of Linux&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the list of Linux distributions I tried:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ubuntu.com\/\">Ubuntu<\/a> 8.10: required Alternative install CD; memory requirements were too high<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.xubuntu.org\/\">Xubuntu<\/a> 8.10: required Alternative install CD; processor too slow<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.debian.org\/\">Debian<\/a> 5.0 + <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lxde.org\/\">LXDE<\/a>: processor stepped to 600MHz by default; Browser (Ice Weasel) performance too slow; too esoteric<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thinkgos.com\/gos\/index.html\">gOS<\/a> 3.1 Gadgets: CD wouldn&#8217;t boot (uses ISOLinux); could use a boot floppy, but the laptop doesn&#8217;t have a floppy drive<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/ul>\n<p>At that point time was running out and I used the recovery CDs that came with the laptop to return to Windows XP. Performance is much better under Windows XP for this particular hardware, although I&#8217;ve ordered an additional 256Mb of RAM which should help a lot for Linux.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m considering trying to install Ubuntu 7.10 and then <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ubuntugeek.com\/howto-install-gos-on-ubuntukubuntuxubuntu.html\">installing the gOS packages<\/a>, but it&#8217;s going to be tough justifying putting more time into this if Windows XP SP3 works fine.<\/p>\n<p><em><strong>Update<\/strong>: I should mention that I used the awesome <a href=\"http:\/\/www.supergrubdisk.org\/\">Super Grub Disk<\/a> to fix the MBR (to boot into Windows) after using the recovery disks. It was a great tool for MBR repair.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em><strong>Update<\/strong>: Installing Puppy Linux as per Rich&#8217;s suggestion. The Live CD was crazy fast, wifi worked without hassle, and the browser (Sea Monkey) comes with a flash player! \ud83d\ude42<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Heidi finally got a new laptop (Compaq CQ60 118TX) on Friday, so I went about repurposing her old computer (Asus S1300A; Pentium3 1GHz, 128Mb RAM) for use by her niece and nephew. Given that she&#8217;s had the same install of Windows XP on it for&#8230; ever (2002), it&#8217;s been running insanely slowly. However, we figured &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/index.php\/2009\/03\/16\/laptop-for-kids\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Laptop for kids&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":67,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paLsRH-do","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/830"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/67"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=830"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/830\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":834,"href":"https:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/830\/revisions\/834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}