I am most impressed

I am playing around with my Dads old lappy, which he replaced on account of it being so unstable under Windows as to be unusable.

Naturally my response to this was to upgrade its ass to Ubuntu 5.10. This option was no good for my Dad because he needs AutoCAD which has no Linux equivalent and cannot be run under WINE, but its great for me since I do most of my work under Linux anyway.

So far not only is it solid as a rock, but the touchpad works (which it didnt the last time I tried Linux on this machine with SuSE 8.4) and the NIC which Samsung declared officially dead 2 years ago has started working again and downloaded over 200MB of stuff from the net without a hitch. Unfortunatly (and obviously) even Ubuntu cant revive the battery which is totally kaput, but the power management in the latest version is at least clever enough to tell me that the battery is flat when I forget to plug in the mains.

So Ubuntu gurus, any tips for making an Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy Badger install even more impressive than it is out of the box on an old Celery 950 Laptop with 108 MB of RAM (16MB is stolen by the alleged graphics card)?

get into the bios. Set that graphics card ram down to 8mb or heck.. if itll let you down to 4mb.

You aint gaming so it shouldnt matter My lappy is running an 8mb (from 256mb) card now and it runs fine .

Try "epiphany" as a browser as opposed to firefox. Its a lightweight browser in comparison and I choose it ahead of firefox anyday

Your probably running i386... may try i686 kernels if its suitable for your machine (no idea with intels).

As for speeding up boot. Try searching the forums for it at ubuntu.com some great tips.. shaved about 10 seconds off of my boot up and shutdown times

wow thanks for the tips so far guys, got BUM and Epiphany installed,

synaptic really is a breeze, Ive only played with Ubuntu pretty briefly before, but Im liking it more and more all the time.

Epiphany is really good too, slick and fast!

This laptop is still on probation until she proves herself able to run in a stable fasion so Im going to stick to proven software for the time being. Shes a little clunky with only 108MB of RAM (good idea with the BIOS BTW Metalhead, Ill have a look but I think I already tried that one a few months ago and 16 is as low as she goes). If I decide to keep her Ill stick another 256Megs or so in.

Linux will use whatever you give it,

I know, you should see SuSE 10 screem on my dual Athlon Desktop with 1GB! 6 desktops all covered in apps, photos open, MP3s playing, web browser windows and word processors everywhere and she never skips a beat. Im not known for tidy computing when it comes to the number of windows I have open at once, hence the Dual Athlon machine.

Do you think this lappy is quick enough to handle XviD playback? even if not then Chimaera (the afformentioned dual Athlon) will be so what program would you recommend? I had a sort of half hearted go at getting the default movie player to do it just now but its getting late so didnt meet with much success. Ill probably have another go tomorrow but any tips would be most welcome.

thats what I thought,

I now have picture, having swapped the default Totem for the Xine version, but as yet I have no sound.

Anyway, early start tomorrow, bed time now,must stop playing with new toy!

cheers for your help so far Maxi and M3ta7h3ad

freeBSD on my work laptop = every device detected straight away, everything working. no hassle.

w00t, got DivX/XviD playback working!

I still have no sound in Totem, but I installed a player called VLC and that seems to work great. Its not got a very pretty interface, but TBH I dont care. Resource hungry eye candy is not what this machine needs!

the sound in Totem works for MP3s and OGGs, but not for DivX or XviD encoded video. I dont have any MPEG video to test it with, so not sure if it works with that.

VLC seems to play just about whatever I throw at it.