Installing 13.10 on older laptop PIII 1.14 GHz, 512 MB RAM

[Richie Bloss]

Hi, currently on 12.04 & just discovered it's not LTS (like Ubuntu), so
might as well go with Saucy.

I just got the Bluetooth (Bluez) devices working, the laptop entering sleep
mode when closing lid & WiFi working.  So why not install 13.10 & do it all
over again.


Last year I was unsuccessful installing 12.04 from CD, the install froze
each & every time. Remember trying several of the options: acpi=off, noapic,
etc. Do not remember everything I tried but really had no idea what i was
doing anyway - still don't :).  Did create a thread on the Ubuntu forums
but can't get to it right now, forums down.

11.10 installs just fine.  I only have a CD drive & the machine does not
support boot from USB.


Here is an email, I saved, from the Lubuntu mailing list a while back:

***************************************************************************
* We need to run Saucy installs on as much hardware as possible as I
>     > believe there is more to this than just RAM size. I suspect some
>     old CD
>     > drives aren't really up to it. I know the one in this machine is
>     > somewhat erratic.
>
>     Therefore we need to recommend the usage of usb live sticks.
>     CD-ROM/DVD-ROM
>     drives tend to fail and also cd/dvd-writers tend to write cd-rs with
>     to much
>     errors.
>
>
> Hello Leszek,
>
> You may forgot that some old machines don't really have USB Ports. If
> these have, the machine doesn't boot from that USB and not everyone
> knows about PLOP, and yes, we are talking about the new and beginners
users.
>
> I do agree that LiveUSB makes a lot of difference indeed as far as I've
> seen for the last 2 years for so many tests I have personally done.
> However, the classic and the standard approach, IMHO, shall be the LiveCD.
*
**
**
* the BIG change with Saucy is the recent inclusion of ZRam, it is for
> this reason we are re-testing "how low can it go" :)*
**************************************************************************


Plop sounds interesting.  I do have a floppy drive that has barely been
used.  Could I create a floppy disk image (plpbt.img?) & boot from that?
 Do I have enough floppy's?

Before I begin thought perhaps I might post here & ask for suggestions
regarding the best way to get the 13.10 install going on an old P3 that has
only CD & will not boot from USB?

Some months back on the Lubuntu Facebook group someone (Phill I
think) suggested an alternate method for installing Lubuntu with a feature
at that time unsupported by Lubuntu.  This was for machines that had
trouble with normal installs from LiveCD.

What about the Minimal Install even tho I see that's applies to PC's with
1/4 the RAM?  Would that make my PC even faster?


On another note:
Have been setting swappiness value to 10 which helps - not completely sure
how zRAM & swappiness differ.  Low values of swappiness avoid swapping
memory to the swap partition as much as possible whereas zRAM creates a
compressed swap partition in RAM, does that sound right?
zRAM appears to make the old P3 faster than swappiness.
Would there be further benefit setting swappiness down to 10 (or 0) with
zRAM installed?
Came across a confusing askubuntu thread thread suggesting:
*zRam is useful for people using computers with 1GB or 2GB RAM. Since zRam
is compressing data, it require some processor resources. Not much, but
always. For that reason i do not recommend to use it with old processors*.
That seems contradictory to the stated objective for zRAM in 13.10.


Sorry if this is too many questions. [?]

thanks

-- 
I'm not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like
I did.
Yogi Berra
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