Linux live distro for netbooks
Low-priced netbooks have often only 1 Gb of ram.
This makes them difficult to use with many
Linux distros from USB as live systems, working
in ram only, either because they are too big or
too old, when used with wireless LAN.
The new version of Peppermint Two could be a
working possibility.
It is based on the current Ubuntu 11.04, or
to be more precise, on Linux Mint 11 with the
Lubuntu desktop LXDE.
The size of the distro for 32 bit is only 442 MB.
The needed Office applications and other needed
programs can be installed easily as the case arises
using the Synaptic apps manager.
Besides that, the distro is optimally prepared
for cloud computing, if this is wanted, using
the Ice SSB application.
Download from here :
http://peppermintos.info/dl1/Peppermint-Two-i386-06052011.iso
and burn the iso to a CD. Do not simply copy it there,
but use the special menu entry command for burning
an iso file in your CD burning program.
Start the cd as a live distro in ram on your desktop computer.
When the desktop comes up, start Synaptic in the menu
System Tools and search for usb-creator.
Mark for installation:
usb-creator-common and usb-creator-gtk
and press Apply.
There will be a new menu entry "StartupDiskCreator"
in the menu System Tools.
Use it to create a bootable USB stick.
On small sticks there will one single partition be
created, on bigger sticks, a second partition for a
persistent home folder is possible.
Make sure that only one stick is in use, to avoid
erasing any unwanted files. Check also the size
of the stick.
The bootable stick with Peppermint should be
ready in only a couple of minutes.
It can then be used to start Linux in ram only
without harddisk installation on your netbook.
If it should only boot Windows, and show no
boot screen, the necessary F key, for example F12
(depending on the netbook brand) must be pressed
when booting.
If the boot menu does not show an entry for the
USB drive, this should be enabled changing the
boot menu, often by pressing F2, when booting
(depending on the netbook brand).
P.S.
For office purposes, Abiword and Gnumeric, which
are normally sized programs, are often sufficient.
If you really need the huge OpenOffice (now LibreOffice),
it is advisable downloading the install debs only
using Synaptic, and transfer them from the folder
/var/cache/apt/archives to a folder on a second USB stick,
to save ram space, and install them from there, writing
in the LX-terminal
sudo dpkg -i -R --force-depends /path-to-the-USB-folder
You can do that in a similar way for many other apps.
You can of course use K-Meleon as your browser after installing
wine with Synaptic. Simply copy it to tha USB stick and
add the necessary dll runtimes into the main K-Meleon folder.
For 1.5 versions these are mfc71u.dll, msvcp71.dll and msvcr71.dll .
For 1.6 versions download and install MSvce8dist.exe from
http://jujuland.pagesperso-orange.fr/
Install it with
wine /your-path-to/MSvce8dist.exe
Start K-Meleon with
wine /your-path-to-K-Meleon-folder/k-meleon.exe
(or sometimes K-Meleon.exe in some versions, because in
Linux capital letters are recognized as such).
This command can of course be added to the start menu.
Fred