Report: Install on a P4

[paul1149]

Just wanted to report how the linuxliteos 2.4 32bit install went on a vista-era box.

The box is a gateway GT5428. It has a Pentium D935, dual core at 3.2ghz, and a maximum 2GB of ddr2 ram, and it came with Vista. That had been upgraded to Win7 32bit, which I was getting tired of trying to make non-sluggish (lot of hard drive churning). Thus I began looking for a lighter weight OS, and after going through a few, I came to LL.

Now to the install. I had problems booting to the LL ISO on a multi-boot thumb drive, so I burned a DVD. No problem.
I had a problem with the installer's partitioning facility. I had previously installed a lightweight linux distro alongside Win7, and now I wanted to install LL over it, still preserving Win7 as a dual boot. So when I got to the main install screen, I couldn't select the first option, which was to wipe everything. I could only select the fourth and last item, "Do something else". The problem was that the next, partitioning, screen had no instructions. I used it to delete and recreate the 2 linux partitions (one was a swap), but didn't know whether merely selecting the target partition would  actually direct the LL install there. I did some research and found that yes it would and proceeded. It would have been simpler to delete the partitions ahead of the installer, but I think there is room for installer improvement, or at least a specific mention in the instructions, on this point.

I am also unclear whether the installer recognized the linux swap file for its own use.

The rest of the install went fine - until it was time to reboot. I had checked "Update during install", and thought that was the reason that it was taking so long to reboot. But no, it was hanging. After 20 minutes I did a forced shutdown.

The next boot-up failed. Wonderful, I thought. But a retry was successful, and it has been ever since.

Back up, I ran the update facility again, and it appeared that the update with the install had done nothing, for this was a fairly substantive download/install operation. Next time I won't bother checking "Update during install".

Anyway, now LL was installed, and Windows was preserved. I began setting up LL, and again let me say I am very impressed with this OS. It is light, elegant and very user friendly. It preserves many of the best aspects of Windows. The Start key works. Even the volume control on my friend's keyboard works. The desktop supports full-fledged copy, paste, drag and drop, etc. The icons line up.

The mouse pointer can be enlarged to any size, which is excellent for my friend.

I installed my preferred browser, Slimjet, a chromium derivative. I had some problems with youtube video, but solved them by unchecking "force flash on youtube" in its settings. But I lost my friend to Firefox when we found that the enlarged mouse pointer did not work in Slimjet, while it worked everywhere else, including FF.

Another anomaly was that none of the Slimjet extensions I copied over worked in LL. That is usually true only of the signed extensions, such as LastPass, but now all of them had to be reinstalled. Not sure why that was, as I've done this before.

The machine is very zippy, and the desktop is attractive. We've got a winner here, and I will certainly recommend LL for any machine that needs a new lease on life. Great job guys.

Blessings,

[torreydale]

When the friend is comfortable with Linux Lite, I recommend installing Linux Lite as the only host OS, and using that Windows 7 license in a virtual machine via Virtualbox or VMware Player for Linux.  Dual booting is like trying to steal 2nd with your foot on 1st. 

When I dual booted, I felt like my Windows 7 side was just wasting drive space.  Furthermore, booting to the Windows 7 side was mainly an exercise in frustration.  I could clearly see how both operating systems performed with the same hardware.  It was a no brainer to switch over as soon as possible.  I have a Windows 7 VM for tax software and VMware vSphere Desktop Client.  That's it.

[Valtam]

Thank you for taking the time to provide feedback

[paul1149]

Thank you. She has no use for a virtual windows, but still that's a good idea in general. I can still shrink the windows partition a lot, yet leave it intact, which I may do. But I'm unfamiliar with how to update grub to reflect a moved linux partition. BTW the large cursor began working in Slimjet. i guess it needed a reboot for some reason.

[N4RPS]

Hello!

I might be mistaken, but

Code:

sudo update-grub

forces a partition check, which should detect the moved partition...

73 DE N4RPS
Rob

[paul1149]

Great. Presumably that would be executed from a Live boot. Thank you!

[N4RPS]

Hello!

If you can, back up the whole drive FIRST - BEFORE making any changes. (I use Redo Backup to do this.)

If you're shrinking a Windows partition to make for a larger Linux partition, it is best to shrink it in Windows. You can then use GPartEd from a LiveCD to grow or move the LL partition, to use the newly-freed space...

73 DE N4RPS
Rob

[paul1149]

Thanks. I definitely would do it that way. My only unknown is editing the grub settings. I don't think gparted does that with the partition change?

[N4RPS]

Hello!

Grub Customizer will let you edit your GRUB settings, and also lets you choose your own custom backgrounds.

Code:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:danielrichter2007/grub-customizer
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install grub-customizer grub2-splashimages

Backgrounds are stored in /usr/share/images/grub folder. To choose one of your own, you can use GIMP to convert .jpg or other images to .tga formatted files of similar resolution to the images of grub2-splashimages...

73 DE N4RPS
Rob

[paul1149]

Thanks. I'll keep this in mind if I make the change.