Anyone using Ubuntu?

Now, I’m not very techy, but I have this old laptop, which isn’t working too well, so I thought I’d have a bash at installing Ububtu on it, thinking that it’ll probably have less guff running than windows, and therefore be faster. It isn’t.

Is anyone else running it?

I think, I have it installed correctly, but programmes are slow to open, internet speeds are way down, under 500kbps, compared to 7500kbps when I boot in windows.

Anyone?

i use it and it is faster for me starting up apps speed not noticable …sadly I have no techy knowledge to impart on this subject though My computer is 1.7 processor and 650 RAM and very old 5 years + I think?

Mine takes longer to start up than windows, but once I get into it everything is much quicker (than both windows and osx).

Try making sure you have all the right drivers installed – you may have to enable ‘restricted extras’ to get proprietary drivers for some things (like wireless cards).

Ubuntu is cool for the amount of work they do on just “making stuff work”, but it is as a result laden down with a lot of cruft that you won’t need. That makes it great for getting started with Linux but it will not be the fastest distro you’ll use. If speed is an issue look for something lighter.

I’m actually not impressed with ubuntu on my laptop either. It’s fine on my work desktop, and on my home desktop, but very unstable on my laptop. Although I don’t know whether it’s a specific issue with ubuntu, or something else, probably the latter.

You may want to try another distro, I’ve heard Xubuntu runs better.

Xubuntu

There’s hundreds of distro’s out there, some targeted at giving you a very lightweight and fast base installation. They may be worth a look, but they probably won’t have the popularity of ubuntu, hence community support may not be as good.

Most distro’s are pretty similar under the hood anyway, so the biggest difference is what window manager your using, and whether you have all the bells and whistles enabled. Try disabling if you do.

Make sure you have the best drivers for your wireless card – just google around see if anyone else has had any similar problems. Network speed should be as good if not better than in windows.

It appears that my network card and it’s driver have a known bug, that limits my connection speed to 1mb/s.

Apparently you can manually adjust it to 54mb/s, but I can’t find where to do it, any ideas?

ta muchly.
x

sorted!

sudo iwconfig wlan0 rate 54M

Type that into the terminal screen thingy 😀