Lubuntu 14.04 LTS Install on Old Dell Laptop

This old Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop, handed down to me because it was really broken, was tired as tired could be. I brought it back to life by eschewing Windows and embracing Lubuntu 14.04 LTS. Now it hums and runs really well. Here are some of my observations.

This Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop has 500mb of Ram, 2 of 4 broken USB ports, and a missing down arrow key. Apparently my mischievous nephew had heard that one of his toys was able to insert into a computer, so he tried this, twice, on this laptop. Two USB ports had sorted out and remain damaged, and Windows XP had crashed hard and was irrecoverable. I tried to rebuild XP, and it was largely successful, but could not configure the wifi to work. XP was slow, and running a browser was painfully slow. In essence it was a dead laptop.

I knew that Ubuntu was coming out with their “Long Term Support”, or LTS version, where they would sup port it for 5 years. The delivery date for 14.04 was April 17 2014, hence the 14.04 numbers. I have an old Acer desktop with 1G ram that would be an ideal candidate, but this old Dell laptop, with half the RAM? Was it even possible?

After some serious research, I found Lubuntu 14.04 LTS really fit the bill. Still, with all ubuntu stuff, there will always be tweaks, and you’ll have to try it to see if it will work. Supposedly Lubuntu with the LXDE desktop environment will work on computers with 256mb of RAM. Lubuntu is the lightest weight version of the Ubuntu family, a variant of Unix. So with 500mb RAM it would fly?

The Install Process: The traditional way to install Ubuntu is from a USB key boot. Alternately you can use a DVD. The DVD was not a solution because this laptop has no DVD player, only a CD player. While I configured the BIOS to boot from USB, the install then asked for a CD. Therefore I was forced to use a CD install. Full Lubuntu 14.04 LTS is large and at 700+ mb unfortunately for me only fits on a DVD. The Ubuntu family has something called an “Alternative iso” install that does fit onto a CD. This is what I used.

USB Key in a good port, boot, and the install begins. After about 5 mins Lubuntu wants to test and read from the CD, so I popped in the Lubuntu 14.04 LTS Alternative ISO CD, and away the install went, successfully completing. It did take a while, around 1 hour to install. Booting up for the first time was non-eventful, as was logging in. Lubuntu worked right off the start using a wired ethernet connection. Once connected Lubuntu continued to install some more.

Chinese Input: I added Simplified Chinese input, without issue. You need to add the Chinese Mandarin language support first. Help here. It seems like iBus does not like [alt][shift] to toggle between input languages. I’ll need to get used to [ctrl] space bar, instead.

Update 02/20/2015: For some reason after my first reboot iBus would not function properly. I even lost the English (US) option. Chinese language was added as a valid language but I could not switch to it. I executed iBus from Terminal and found out that I did not have permission to execute iBus as root. One thread said to delete the /home/[user]/.config/ibus/bus/ directory and the ibus-daemon would recreate it and fix the issue. The directory was recreated but did not solve the problem. My solution was to delete the directory with a rm -rf, then uninstall iBus, reboot, then reinstall it. Now it seems to be working Ok, 很好。

Adding Apps: I added 2 toolbar “applets” to the bottom bar, one to monitor the system and one to show me the network status. These are quite small. After updating the system software the Lubuntu Software Center started working. As this system will be mostly for internet browsing, there was no need, yet to add most software, but when I do it is easy to download.

Internet Browsers: Firefox comes standard with Lubuntu and it works really well. I had to download a Flash plugin, but that was it. Chromium, a variant of Google Chrome was easy to download but did not work well because it collides with the IBus language input software. As I do not use Chrome much this has not been an issue yet, and I know how to fix it.

Update Feb 09 2015: I downloaded Google Chrome, but not from Ubuntu but straight from Google. It really downloads, installs and works flawlessly.

Google Plus really taxes this system for memory. After downloading the Google Chat plugin, I started a chat with a friend, during which the computer ran out of memory and crashed the browser. I restarted Firefox and all was again well. This is remarkable for an old XP system that could hardly hobble through simple browsing.

Dual Monitors: My Little Weed has been wanting dual monitors for a long time, so I hooked up a second LCD monitor to the laptop. Out of the box the LCD monitor was detected, and through Preferences > Monitor Settings was able to turn it on. This allowed the LCD monitor to duplicate the laptop screen. I wanted to extend the screen so that the LCD monitor would extend the laptop screen, effectively making the laptop screen twice the size. This I could not do with standard Lubuntu. With a little research I found a little program called ARandR, which I downloaded through the Synaptic Package manager. From Preferences > ARandR I was able to grab the LCD screen, which was initially overlapping the laptop screen, and place it beside the laptop screen, ensuring that the bottom edge of the LCD screen aligned with the bottom edge of the laptop screen. This alignment is critical because when you click the checkmark the Lubuntu taskbar extends across the LCD screen. Without the bottom edge alignment the taskbar is not visible, and therefore the applets such as sound, keyboard, and logoff are also not visible. Click the checkmark on ARandR, the screens extend and all is well.

Note that every time you use dual monitors you will need to use ARandR to set your screen. There is an option to save your settings to a file. This is useful because next time you can just load your settings from a file, hit the check mark and your screen extends.

Update June 2014: Our laptop screen has gone dark and now we can only use an external monitor, so no more dual screens for us. Boohoo.

Update Feb 10 2015: Searching without success on the Ubuntu forum, it looked like Lubuntu was working as it should. I then researched the possibility of a hardware fault. I plugged in a spare broken screen and it came alive, so I knew that the video inverter was working Ok, so the backlight was defective. After a couple of hours I removed the backlight from another Dell I just happen to have and installed it. It all worked out very well. Now we have dual monitors again.

A strong community of support is really essential when configuring Lubuntu. You cannot know everything about this system, and it is best to ask others who are more knowledgeable than you.

Wifi Networking: The Intel Pro/Wireless 2200bg card was not picking up my wireless network, so I posted up on the ubuntu.forums but before I could get a reply I found out my problem. Firstly the wireless icon on my keyboard does turn on and off the wireless card, but does not turn off and on the wireless LED indicator. Therefore you do not know when the wireless card has been activated. I had to use a Terminal command “rfkill list all” which gave me:

0: phy0: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: no

Hit the wireless key 2 and this hard blocked will switch to “yes”, but the laptop’s wifi indicator light will remain off.

I configured both the wired and wireless connections using Preferences > Network Connections. Configuring the wired Ethernet connection is really easy, but the wireless one was tricky. Firstly there is a dropdown for your computer’s wireless network media access control, or Mac address, the unique identifier for a network card. Even configured I could not see my network, nor anyone else’s network. Then somehow after I changed locations other networks started sporadically popping up in my network display, and not when I clicked the network icon. I sometimes could click on a secure network and was prompted to log in.

It turns out that I had blocked broadcast of my network’s SSID. My network could then not be detected by Lubuntu. Windows and IOS this is not an issue, but unbeknownst to me is a big issue with Lubuntu. I got to my router and broadcast my SSID, my network displayed, was detected by Lubuntu and logged me in. Once logged in I was able to tweak my network setting using “Network Connections”, as there was now a dropdown for BSSID. This BSSID holds the Mac address of your router and is used if you do not broadcast your SSID. Once saved I was able to again block my SSID through my router but still allow Lubuntu to find and log into my network.

I have been playing with Lubuntu on this laptop for just over a week and it is really stable. I have also learned a lot about unix. The laptop has performed very well so far, so I have bought 2G of Ram from ebay.ca. I hope the upgrade will speed up Lubuntu and allow my Little Weed to really push and extend the system even further.

Why Install Lubuntu? I am very tired of the Windows philosophy of requiring new hardware almost every time you upgrade your operating system. Windows XP was good but was getting slow on older computers. Now that Microsoft has ended support for XP these computers are more at risk. Ads espousing people to upgrade to Windows 7 or 8 do not mention that you will need a new computer, one that has a faster processor, much more memory, and more disk space. What to do with the older PCs then, just throw them in the garbage? This is wasteful, expensive and I will not do it if I have the choice.

Lubuntu is a viable option for a technology person like myself, who can take an old XP machine and try to revive it. Lubuntu is not Windows, so if you want Windows programs this will not work. Alternatively if you can find similar programs on ubuntu or unix, then you should be set. I will try to load Lubuntu onto computers with between 500mb and 2256mb of RAM, just to see if it will run, and how fast. The minimum I believe now is 256mb RAM for a desktop environment.

Who knows, but this sure is exciting. Lubuntu offers more computing power for existing computers, and is therefore an environmentally responsible decision for older computers. You will not be able to save all the old systems, but as I did this circa 2005 laptop, you can save some of them.

Updates:
-toolbar > right click > Add/Remove Panel Items > add “Manage Networks”: adds 2 icons, one for each network card source
-Preferences > Default Applications for LXSessions > added “nm-applet”: This gives me an tool to connect and disconnect wireless networks on the toolbar. It works very well. source
-using Synaptic download indicator-multi-load: gives you a graph of how much CPU/other resources you are using
-Update: after my Lubuntu reinstall I opted to not use any of these applets.

-trying to do Windows network share source does not work

Lubuntu Software Center Does not update
-sudo dpkg-reconfigure lubuntu-software-center

Fix Chromium
-add package fcitx, right click keyboard on task bar, replace ibus with fcitx, stop ibus
-ibus cannot be removed because it is part of lubuntu desktop
-Chromium has no working plugin for java. Installed java plugins work for Firefox, but not Chromium
-I found that Chromium would repeatedly crash when playing videos, especially from TED.
-no longer needed because we can now download Google Chrome for Ubuntu

Windows Networking
This was one of the harder installs, simply because there is so much info out there that did not work. I want to access my Windows network and files. I therefore only need the Samba client, which comes standard with Lubuntu 14.04. You do not need Samba. You only need to configure 2 files:
/etc/samba/smb.conf change workgroup to yours, add “netbios name = ” right underneath it
etc/nsswitch.conf add “win” in this line, using sudo leafpad, like this:

hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] win dns

After this you can use Accessories > File Manager PCManFM > Go > Network to browse your windows network. You may be asked for the ID and password if you have set up Windows security
Samba client source

While I was able to get Samba working and networking with the rest of my Windows network, I still cannot connect to my HP p1005 laserjet that is connected to my Win2k PC. I’ll need to work on this.

Skype install
-This was difficult. I installed the 19 dependencies using Synaptic, after I downloaded the .deb, but could not install the .deb file with GDebi Package Installer. Solution
cd /Downloads
sudo su -c “gdebi skype-ubuntu*4*.deb”
-Instead of Skype I just use Google Plus. It is more reliable and does not required a special install.

Mic Does not Work
Installed the Gnome Alsa Mixer. This allowed me to unmute and boost the mic. You can also do this from Terminal > alsamixer
Update: After reinstalling Lubuntu this seemed to have solved itself.

Summary

Lubuntu is not for everyone. Overall I would say that for the average person, installing and maintaining a Lubuntu system is out of their reach. Sure, the install might go well, but the tweaks and updates required are too complex for most people. Support forums for Ubuntu are still the domain of the geek.

That being said, if a geek receives an old computer with sufficient RAM, Lubuntu might make it really shine. When Ubuntu and Unity might be too heavy, you will need a geek to figure out and fine tune Lubuntu.