ubuntu

[red321]

Wife bought a $5 laptop the other day at a garage sale. Brought it home. Shut down every device on the network and booted it up...long story short the thing was riddled with all sorts of viruses/malware..no wonder they got rid of it.

 

Tried to create a windows 8 installation usb and wipe it clean to no avail (and lots of yelling and screaming)...so I said screw it and just installed ubuntu. $5  and we have a pretty spiffy laptop with a 17 inch screen. The only downside is...damn keyboard cut the lower left shit key in half and put the backslash key on the other half (which it looks like ubuntu remapped to the < key so I'm going to have to fix that). For a touch typist that is going to be a pain in the ****ing ass.

 

So, next question...what the hell do I do with an ubuntu laptop? What would I need to add to it to make it a media server or something like that? It's not as fast as I thought it would be, even with a 64 bit installation (2gb of ram). would I be better off installing the 32 bit version...maybe something besides ubuntu?

 

 

 

 

[gotbeer]

Man red.  Too bad you wiped it.  You should have downloaded one of those undelete programs.  Installed it using a USB, and see what types of things that person was downloading to cause so many virus/malwares.  lol.

 

It would depend on the processor for 32 vs 64 bit installation.  I'm not familiar at all with Ubuntu, but the conflicts might be with that.  Most laptop are built with Windows specs in mind.  If you want to go back to win 8/10, I'd do a clean install.  Again, depending on how old the laptop is, it might be an issue with that.  Might have been an xp or lower machine that they thought would be a good idea to upgrade to win 8.  

[red321]

When I saw how infected this thing was, I had no desire to screw around with it much longer than need be! Wife says they were Russian so i'll let your imagination go from there.

 

I did try the Windows 10 route, but it was originally Vista and the software product key on the back of the laptop didn't qualify for the free Windows 10 upgrade (of course it took me 8 hours to get to that point!). Once I switched over from Firefox to Chrome the performance has gotten better. Now I just need to figure out the key remapping.

[gotbeer]

Yeah, if it was vista.  Might be better off going to xp maybe 7.  

[nate]

Does ubuntu use a modified GNOME desktop?  I can't remember.  Honestly those Linux GUI's use just as many resources as Windows and sometimes even more.  They aren't as efficient because they don't spend the dev time on being a desktop computer.

 

You can download Apache packages and setup a web server pretty easily.  For media you can use Plex.  All of it is really easy to setup, you can find the step by steps online.

[nate]

When I saw how infected this thing was, I had no desire to screw around with it much longer than need be! Wife says they were Russian so i'll let your imagination go from there.

 

I did try the Windows 10 route, but it was originally Vista and the software product key on the back of the laptop didn't qualify for the free Windows 10 upgrade (of course it took me 8 hours to get to that point!). Once I switched over from Firefox to Chrome the performance has gotten better. Now I just need to figure out the key remapping.

 

Keymap is in the language/localization settings.

[red321]

good call Nate...it doesn't let me correct the key mapping...but it does show me what other incorrectly mapped key will give me \.

 

Now I just need to figure out how to change the mapping of one of the keys to shift left so it stops typing < every time I'm trying to use the shift key. Dumb physical design of the keyboard...but other than that best investment of $5 and $13 on a new battery that we've made in a long time.

Edited September 12, 2015 by red321