FreeSpire 2.0.8 - First Impressions

Regular readers may remember my quest to find the perfect GNU/Linux for my elderly HP OmniBook XE (40 gb hard drive, 156 meg RAM, running at a cracking 450mhz). I have tried a few different distros with varying levels of success - Green OS being the closest so far.

I've been playing with XP on the beast too - which worked surprisingly well on the limited hardware and memory.

Recently I went back to try a current version of Freespire, which like Green OS is based on Ubuntu. I've had limited success with Ubuntu itself, but strangely enough distros based on it seem to work well.

Freespire is no exception. I'd decided to set the laptop to dual boot between XP and Freespire in case everything went tits up. I'd given Freespire a dry run on an old Dell PC which I'd had lying around.

If you do a default install (and take over the entire disk) then the install is entirely painless, and slightly easier than installing Windows XP.

Setting up a dual boot on FreeSpire through was less straight forward. Choosing an "Advanced" install gave me a list of the current partitions, but no way to resize them. It recommended rebooting and choosing the third option to amend the partitions.

The third option turned out to be the graphical safe mode - nothing to do with resizing the disk. In the end I turned to an old Ubuntu CD and used that to resize the Windows XP partition. Returning to Freespire with 20 gig of free space I tried the advanced install again - even with free space on the drive there was no way of creating partitions.

Bugger.

Back into Ubuntu and I created a large main partition and smaller swap one. Returning to FreeSpire and this time I was able to select my new partition ready for the install. But wait, even though the partition was available and selected there was still no option to continue the install. Yes folks, we have hit the curse of the 800x600 screen resolution.

The "next" button was hidden off the bottom of the screen. Hitting "Tab" a couple of times then pressing "Enter" got me onto the next stage of the install and after that it was plain sailing. Right up to the point where I re-booted.

Grub came up, but no option for my Windows installation.

Aaaaaargh!

Luckily there was an option to redetect and after running that and rebooting again an option for Windows XP did appear.

But enough about the install. Once I had Freespire up and running it actually works rather well. My wireless card was detected and easily runs as well as it does on Windows XP. Connecting to my wireless network was a snap using the provided tools. The onboard sound card runs well, everything feels nice and snappy.



A real bonus is the CNR (Click 'n' Run) service. You don't need to register to run it (although it is free to do so if you wish), and installing additional software is as simple as choosing it from the list and clicking "Install". I've already added "The Gimp" and "Amarok" onto the laptop and I've got to say it was entirely painless.

Another "good thing" is that MP3s work from the outset. Flash is also pre-installed (so YouTube works out of the box). In fact, as far as multimedia goes Freespire is as good as it gets. All the codecs are legally licensed versions and I can safely say that this is a Linux distro that is squarely aimed at giving as good a user experience out of the box as you are likely to find.

Freespire looks good, is nippy enough to install on low-end hardware (P2 class and above) and feels like a modern operating system should.

Overall I've got to say that I've been pleasantly surprised at just how well it works. Yes, the install was a bit quirky (if you want to install alongside Windows that is) but once it is on the whole thing runs really well.

I'm going to stick with it for a while and see if it holds up to prolonged usage. But so far, so good!

Update (11/4/2008)

In the interests of fairness, I'm going to admit something. The install instructions were correct. If you boot into the "Live CD" environment then the partition manager is right there on the desktop.

D'oh!

I've stuck with FreeSpire for a couple of weeks now - and it really does work like a charm. In fact, I'm currently playing with an old Toshiba Satellite 4600, which also works really well with FreeSpire. High resolution graphics, decent performance, the built in wireless card also works out of the box too.

XP on old hardware

Regular readers may remember the "fun" I had trying to get my el-cheapo wireless cards running under Linux. The USB adapter as it turns out is broken (it only runs for ten minutes at a time before crapping out), the WalkLAN PCMCIA card doesn't run properly under Linux although it is supposed to be supported (it locks the system solid).

To test the card out I decided to re-install Windows 98SE and test the card with that - but wouldn't you know it, I can't find where the install CDs have gone. Fortunately I'd a spare XP Pro license so for an experiment I've installed that instead.

The actual install was straight-forward, if a bit slow. I've got to admit I wasn't expecting too much performance-wise from this once it was installed. After all, a Celeron 433 with 160meg of memory is hardly an XP powerhouse.

How wrong I was.

It runs like a charm. It is fast to boot, all the hardware appears to be supported (mind you, I'd have been surprised if it wasn't) and after tracking down the driver for the WalkLAN card the wireless support is spot-on.

At the moment to stress-test the card I'm installing all the required updates to Windows XP (nearly 100 of them!) which should take over an hour to do. And while I'm doing that I'm also browsing the web, and writing this in Blogger. Internet Explorer, while it isn't my favourite web browser by a long chalk, is actually performing well, and is certainly keeping up with my typing.

The battery life seems OK too. I'll test this a bit more over the weekend and update this with my thoughts on it, but looking good so far!

Update 04/02/2008

I've been pleasantly surprised with how well this runs. OK, so it's a bit iffy for YouTube, but that's more down to the display than the Laptop (lots of moving stuff tends to blur quite a bit). But beyond that small gripe the rest of it is fine and dandy.

Hibernate works well - it shuts down quickly and restarts from cold in well under 40 seconds. This is probably down to the fact that it only has 160 meg of memory to restore.

Browsing works well, both in FireFox and Internet Explorer. The wireless card has worked flawlessly - even during the kids mammoth CBeebies browsing session lasting a couple of hours.

Before anyone asks, no, I'm not becoming a Windows convert. If the wireless card had been supported properly in Linux I'd have still been using that, but until I get the chance to swap the card for something better then I'm pretty much stuck - especially as I'd need to prise the wife away from the laptop with a crowbar to get her off Ebay. . . .

A couple of things that are pretty good to install to get that good freeware feeling back:

Rocket Dock - A pretty good MacOS style dock copy. Although officially it needs a 500 processor (or higher) it works really well on a 433.

The Gimp - Needs no introduction really. My image editor of choice.

Open Office - The Microsoft beating free software office package (well nearly anyway).

gOS (Green OS, not Google OS)

A couple of weeks ago Everex released a low cost (sub $200) PC running on Linux. The PCs were on sale at Walmart. Note the past tense here. They sold out within days.

The PCs themselves aren't that highly powered (1.5GHz processor, 80GB hard drive, 512 meg memory) but are certainly more than up to daily word processing and web browsing tasks. The big news was the choice of Linux distro - gOS.

Despite rumours this isn't Google OS - it's Green OS, but unofficially it contains so much integrated Google stuff that it is hard to see it as anything other than Google OS.



Although the PCs are sold out at the moment, developer boards are available which all come with a DVD version of gOS. This includes licensed versions of all codecs needed for MP3 playback, DVD playback and some other stuff too.

gOS is available for download from http://www.thinkgos.com/ as a single live / install CD.

So what is gOS like? First impressions are very nice. The desktop runs on Enlightenment. It looks remarkably MacOS X like, right down to the dock at the bottom of the screen.

gOS detects most wireless cards without problems (seeing as this is based on Ubuntu 7.10 this shouldn't be a surprise) and the hardware support is quite good.

The installer looks very slick - but I did have some problems getting it to install on my laptop. After a few hours (aaargh!) of trying I finally managed to repartition the drive using gOS, reboot, manually install an ext3 file system, go back into the installer, choose a manual install, selected the already existing partitions, and then it worked.

This was certainly not as smooth as it might be.

On the plus side, the installer works fine on an 800x600 screen (unlike some other installers I could mention).

Once it has been installed it boots quickly, launches apps quickly and generally feels snappy even on old hardware. Yes folks, the trusty old HP OmniBook has been rolled out and reinstalled again. This may well be the cause of the HD install problems as the OmniBook hardware is, well, finicky.

The OS itself feels like the best of both worlds in that it is small and fast enough to run on old hardware, but looks and feels very modern indeed. As it is based on Ubuntu there is plenty of software available for it via Synaptic, the system is well documented, in fact, it is difficult to find much to complain about.

I'll have to play some more with it and see if the initial positive impressions hold up.

Linux (and BSD) on a HP OmniBook XE2 - Part 2

Although I've had Linux working on the old OmniBook, one problem had shown up - that was that the wireless card drops its connection after a couple of minutes. So my quest for the perfect free operating system for this old laptop continues.

FreeBSD has a reputation of good support of wireless cards, so it was with high hopes that I downloaded the latest version PC-BSD and installed it on the laptop.

First impressions weren't promising. The installer doesn't fit on an 800x600 screen, small, unimportant things like confirmation buttons are not visible and can only be accessed by the old "hit and hope" method of hitting tab and pressing enter and hoping that the correct option has been selected. Through a mix of luck and bloody mindedness I got PC-BSD installed.

The graphics card was detected, but showed some corruption once KDE had started up. Sound worked fine. The wireless card on the other hand was absent without leave. After a bit of searching through all the options looking for the configuration program for the card (there wasn't one) I discovered that you need to run a shell command and have the Windows drivers to hand to get the wireless card running.

Although this is nice as a fallback option, really this shouldn't be the default. Linux manages to support the cards natively, why can't BSD?

As a last resort I tried the distribution formerly known as Mandrake - Mandriva. Their latest release is Mandriva 2008, which runs as a live CD but can also be installed to disk. Running the live CD was a slow process as the CD drive isn't that fast on the OmniBook, but once the OS was installed to disk - wow! Colour me impressed - this is really good.

The wireless card was detected without any problems at all - and has remained connected to my wireless network without any problems with dropping the connection. The default desktop looks great, with no graphical corruption (unlike BSD). The onboard sound has been detected and works well. The local network shows up without any issues at all (browse smb:/ through Konqueror to see the local Samba shares).

What is really good is that even on this old laptop the whole thing feels snappy. Apps launch with very little delay. Web pages launch quickly. In fact, there is very little to complain about. I really like Mandriva 2008. It feels like a lot of time has been taken in getting things "just right" and compared to the other distributions this just feels so much better.

The on-screen fonts look better than I would have thought possible, the icon scheme looks slick, the only slight downer is that by default MP3 playback won't work. This is down to licensing issues, but luckily there are third party solutions for this.

All in all, it looks like the perfect Linux for this laptop may turn out to be one of the least likely ones.

Linux on HP OmniBook XE2

(last updated 07/10/2007)

Sometimes working in IT does have its benefits. Take today for example. We´ve been clearing out some of our old hardware, and amongst the 80486, Pentium I and Pentium IIs was a small stack of old laptops. Most of them were digital doorstops, but there was a stack of three HP OmniBook XE2s. All three of them had problems - but thankfully not the same problem, so I was able to swap things around a bit and come out with a working (if low-spec) laptop.

The spec of the rescued laptop is a Celeron 433, 160 meg RAM, 40GB hard drive, 800x600 resolution display. Although the laptop doesn´t have any in-built network ports I do have an old wireless card that I´ve wanted to try.

I wanted to test the laptop out with Linux, but the only distro I had to hand was an old beta version of Freespire, but what the Hell, at least I could use it as a quick test even if I was going to replace it with Ubuntu later on.

The install was straight forward, taking around half an hour. I accepted the defaults and took over the entire hard drive. Everything (including the sound card) was detected OK. So far, so good.

Now here is a good thing. Freespire auto detected my wireless card and it works fine with my home network. In fact, I´m posting this from the Laptop.

I´m probably going to install something a bit more lightweight on this (probably Slackware), but I´ve got to admit that I am impressed with how easily everything was installed, and how little configuration was required.

I´m going to play around a bit more with this - who knows, I might even keep Freespire on for a few days.

. . . .

Update #1 - 6/10/2007

Or maybe not. One problem with Freespire is that it is dog slow on older hardware. This is a shame - as overall the distro seemed rather nice. Click'n'Run works well for installing additional software and updates, but the laptop just seemed to be running slower than my old Pentium MMX 233 laptop. I'm not too sure if this was entirely Freespires fault, as I was running on battery power so it may have stepped down the CPU speed. One good positive is that at least I know that my wireless card will work with Linux.

I did give Ubuntu Gutsy a try but couldn't get it to boot into the live CD. This is strange as Freespire is based on Ubuntu and it worked fine. I'll maybe give Ubuntu another try at a later date and see if I can figure out what is going wrong.

So instead I'm re-installing the laptop with Zenwalk, a Slackware derived distro. I've always fancied giving something like Zenwalk a shot and I'm certainly curious as to how it will compare with something more "modern" like Freespire, Ubuntu or Mandriva.

Ths Zenwalk installer is very similar to the traditional Slackware one in that it is text based. One important difference is that you don't choose the packages that need to be installed, this is a single CD with everything you need on it. I'm installing using the default options, so this will be taking over the entire hard drive and configuring the partitions itself.

The Zenwalk install took around 40 minute and takes up a similar amount of space to Freespire. One notable difference is that whilst Freespire creates one large partition, Zenwalk gives us separate Root, Home and Swap partitions. I've got to admit this is a much better way of laying out the disk, as at least if you need to re-install at some point then your home directory and files will be safe.

After the main install has finished, there are a couple of options to configure for things like the Admin password, adding a new user and so on, then you reboot, the sound card is detected and on you go.

Or not, as the case may be. Zenwalk uses a very minimalist desktop enviroment (XFCE) - too minimalist for my liking. Also although it detected the wireless card (whoo!), it doesn't work (boo!). It took a while to track down the problem - which turns out to be the firmware for the card (an Atmel based one) isn't included. Once I'd tracked down the firmware and copied the .BIN files into /lib/firmware, one reboot later and everything was working great.

Not a difficult thing to do once you know about it, but not really that well documented. Yes, there were warnings (available via dmesg) but how many novices are going to check there?

Oh well, at least it does work. Zenwalk certainly feels faster than Freespire, it also boots up a lot faster (around half the time that Freespire took). Right - time to play around with it a bit more.

. . . .

Update 2 - 7/10/2007

Well, Zenwalk works OK, MP3 and MPEG playback worked out of the box, USB devices are automounted, everything pretty much works as expected.

One issue I have found is with the Zenwalk tools. If you are running in 800x600 then you can't use all of the tools. This is especially true of the update tool - which although you can view the software, and add it to the list to install, the install button is hidden - presumably somewhere off the bottom of the screen.

I'm going to install KDE from the Zenwalk repositories and see how that works, as I'm still not sure about XFCE.