Baby Seal saves the day ...

This baby seal saved two laptops and a netbook from certain death.

The two laptops were a couple of Dell Studio 1535’s stuck running Microsoft Vista with no prospect of an upgrade to a later operating system. Built like tanks and in perfect working order, it seemed a shame to throw them away just because the software was obsolete. The netbook was a similarly robust ASUS which was labouring under the weight of Windows 7 Starter edition - so slow it was unusable.

I had tried upgrading the Dells to Linux with no success, as I couldn’t find drivers for Dell’s wireless card. Then, last week I saw a YouTube video about “Cloud Ready” at www.neverwear.com.  Cloud Ready is a repackaging of the Chromium OS (the open-source version of Google’s Chrome OS). It effectively turns an old laptop into a Chromebook device. It is free for home use and is supported for OS upgrades through Cloud Ready’s servers in the same automatic way that Google upgrades Chrome OS. Read about the company here: https://www.neverware.com/about

I tried the ASUS netbook first with a do or die overwrite of Windows. Half an hour later I had a fully functional Chromebook, working exactly like the actual Chromebook we brought last year. I tried to be a little more circumspect with the Dells and set them up as dual-boot with Vista as a fall-back. Unfortunately, the Dells didn’t like this and forced me into an all or nothing conversion. I need not have worried, Cloud Ready installed perfectly (even though the Dells were not on their tested and approved hardware list). Everything on the Dells work, even down to the media soft buttons.

I am really impressed with this implementation of Chromium; the setup is easy and the Cloud Ready site has the most comprehensive set of installation instructions I have ever seen. Battery life on all three machines is massively improved from what it was under Windows (though still not up to modern day standards). There seems little not to like here; if a Chromebook can meet your needs, then this is a free way of breathing life back into an old laptop or netbook.

The cute baby seal? Oh, he was $5 in a bargin bin at Farmers. Rip his head off and he becomes an 8GB USB stick - just the right size for holding the Cloud Ready installer.

Down the Linux Drain

I am unsure how much of my life has gone down the Linux Drain - probably it would be measured in months rather than hours or minutes. What do I mean by the Linux Drain? Well, it’s all the time spent trying to get something to work in Linux, rather than actually using Linux to be productive. Linux is like that - it usually comes broken and needs repairing before you can get to work. For this reason it has been a few years since I invested any time in Linux; life is too short.

Then along came this Chromebook which just worked right out the box. Chrome OS is built on Linux. Maybe things have improved. So I looked at resurrecting an old Netbook, which, apart from the rubbish Windows 7 Starter Operating System, was otherwise in good condition. Perhaps Chromium (the open source version of Google’s Chrome OS) could bring it back to life.

Nope. Same old, same old. Unless the Chromium OS has been tailored to the hardware (as Google and their partners do) chances are that things will be broke. In the case of the Netbook I couldn’t get past the networking (wireless and wired) not working. One day down the toilet searching the web and trying assorted solutions that yielded no positive results.

The problem is I don’t like to give up easily. Problems require solutions and that’s what I do - find solutions. So I parked Chromium as a lost cause and went looking for a lightweight Linux distribution that would work on my Netbook. Enter Peppermint 5, a distribution specifically designed for the cloud (like Chromium) and for older (read underpowered) hardware.

Peppermint 5 running on an ASUS 1015PX Netbook

I would like to tell you that Peppermint 5 worked straight out of the box. But it didn’t. What did work was all the basic hardware on the Netbook, including the network - at least that made it possible to resolve the other issues which were largely to do with partitioning the Netbook’s hard drive when it came time to do the permanent install. Getting Peppermint 5 working on the Netbook took another two days of my life. (Did I mention my persistence?)

In this instance I am very pleased with the result - a nicely working Netbook class machine that boots quickly and runs way faster than it ever did with Windows 7 Starter - new life for older hardware. But with Linux it doesn’t always end so happily - too often it ends in tears of frustration and failure. Linux is built for those who love tinkering with operating systems; not for those who simply want to get things done. It’s a shame, Linux could be so much more and so much better, than a drain.

(Article written in Gingko, and Blogger using Peppermint 5 running on an ASUS Netbook)