My eee701 is not doing very much anymore, but sometimes it is handy to have it around. I have not upgraded it since Lubuntu 13.10, and that version is not supported anymore. I found that:
- Since 13.10 is abandoned upgrading with apt-get generated errors.
- 15.04 Lubuntu desktop ISO complains that the hard drive is less than 4.1Gb.
- 14.04.2 Lubuntu desktop ISO complains that the hard drive is less than 4.5Gb.
Thus, the standard upgrade or installation paths were blocked. And I was not very interested in putting lots of effort into getting my eee701 running a current system.
Instead, i tried the Ubuntu mini-iso. That was very nice! The iso itself is written with dd (rather than the Startup Disk Creator) to USB drive. The installation is text (curses) based, but very guided (just like Debian). I choose a single 4GB ext4 partition for root, no swap (since I have 2GB RAM) and “Xubuntu minimal” desktop. Keyboard, Wifi and timezones were all correctly set up. When installation was complete and system restarted I had 1.8Gb used and 1.7Gb available. Not even a web browser was installed, but Xubuntu itself was fine.
Not bad at all!
Interesting suggestion. But if you’re going to do without stuff like a browser and Flash, why not just start with Debian, and avoid some of the Ubuntu novelties?
I wonder if this laptop still makes sense for something in 2017. Maybe it can quietly and slowly serve as a honeypot or scraper.
Thanks for the prodding! I will return this box to production.