I have a old Toshiba Tecra 8000 laptop running Ubuntu. It's got a PII 300mhz CPU and 256MB of Ram and a very slow 6gb HD.

Ubuntu is painfully slow on this system. It takes a while to boot, and even once firefox is eventually loaded, it's slow to navigate pages. Dapper may help in this regard, as it'll have Firefox 1.5 which is quicker, and the next release of Gnome should have much lower memory requirements which may help.

I use a networking card I brought from http://openforeveryone.co.uk/perifs3.php?id=12. This card works well, it's plug and play with Ubuntu, once installed, but Ubuntu is unable to find the card during installation (not a major issue really, network repos will just be disabled by default). Next version (Dapper) of Ubuntu *should* support Centrino via a newer kernel.

Hope this helps.

On Sat, 2006-01-21 at 21:23 +0000, Simon Royal wrote:

I want to buy a laptop to run it on and wondered if anyone had it running on a lo-spec machine as I am short on cash so need to find cheap laptop to run it on.

I wondered if anyone has wireless experience in Ubuntu as I have a 802.11g wireless network and what machines they have been run on.

I have run it on a few low spec machines including my trusty Fujitsu P1120 sub notebook (Transmeta 800 256MB ram) On that it was pretty slow (transmeta is probably equivalent to a Intel chip of half it's clock speed) I think having more memory helps Gnome if that's what you want to run...sadly the memory in the fujitsu is not upgradeable.

Boot times can be slow with the default installation, but a bit of tweaking can help a lot...One thing is that if you have DHCP on your wireless network it will seem to sit there hunting for ages when you are out of range, Some other distributions background background this and carry on with the boot.

Had various Wireless card working..For internal MiniPCI cards the atheros card in my Thinkpad was working well (up until the latest kernel update) Intel 2915abg or the 2200 range work perfectly. For PCMCIA I have had a couple of the linksys ones working (which I think are also Atheros based).

You have to be careful with wireless...a few manufacturers change chipsets from one vendor to another but keep the same model number (usually it's just revision 1 or revision 2) and it's not unusual for only one of the revisions to be well supported.

That's why whenever possible I try to see if the laptop has a miniPCI slot and is wired for the antenna (a surprising number of machines from the last 4 years are) and just stick one of the intel cards in there*

I'd say that for the full fat Gnome experience you need at least 600Mhz and 256MB RAM before the thing is even usable, but as others have suggested the Ubuntu minimal "server" installation and one of the lightweight WMs will perform ok on lesser hardware.

*Not so recommended if you also want to run Windows...getting the intel cards to work in Windows on anything other than the Centrino chipset machines can be a bit of a challenge sometimes. Also you can't do this on Thinkpads without using one of the cards on a very short IBM approved list, although I think there is a Bios patch to sort that now.