So I’ve been telling a friend that I have a laptop for him. Now he actually wants it. So I went and turned it on; apparently I once thought that it would be a good idea to put Gentoo on the thing. So I logged in and ran
emerge --sync
which didn’t take too long. Next, I ran my usual
emerge -NuDav world
and looking at the packages, which included a bash upgrade, I figured it would take a while. So I said yes, and off it went. And went. And went. That was three weeks ago and I finally had to cut it off. It was still compiling bash when I stopped the madness.
…
Fast forward to the present day. I installed Xubuntu, which uses Xfce desktop environment. It is now installed and running pretty well. If you have an older, lower spec machine that you want a free OS for, try out Xubuntu.
After doing this install and setup, my friend’s neighbor asked how much it would cost to setup his ailing Dell C600 like my buddies. I told him that I would take a look at it for free and then let him know.
Initially, I was told it was desktop, but then when I went to look at it, it was in fact a laptop. This made it much easier, but after examining it, I think that it needs more RAM. I am trying to install xubuntu on it right now, but it is just kind of struggling along right now with 128 meg. I guess we’ll see.