a walk on the dark side

by Victorismyhero Sun Apr 21, 2019 8:03 pm

Well, I found an old (2005 vintage) fujitsu stylistic ST5031 tablet pc kicking about in one of my many boxes of bits and bobs...

it is an A4 screen so quite a good size, especially for a bozzeyed old fogey like me and is JUST a PC, no phone etc.

now it was as you would imagine from the age, set up with the then state of the art win XP...which is nowadays as much use as a concrete parachute, in fact it is my belief that xp has been crippled, certainly nothing works as it should, although the system is actually ok...but none of the web browsers work anymore ...etc etc...sooooo....I removed xp , and thought win 10? then i thought...... on a machine with a 1.2GHz processor and only 2 Gig of ram and ONLY a 60MB hard drive???? Nah...thats NOT gonna turn out good.
so what to do.....so I took a walk on the dark side and looked at linux systems, of which there are as many flavours as there are android puddings.....and settled for one called LXLE, which is a lightweight racing snake version especially suited to old machines. Now some years ago I "played with "Red Hat linux and hated it, buggy, difficult to use and really needed you to be a proficient linux programmer to get it to do well, almost anything.
LXLE on the other hand, whilst not as plug and play as windows of any version, and not quite so user friendly (or is that user mollycoddling?) is actually VERY useable as long as you are familiar with command line prompts, especially if you F**k it up when installing updates when it says "manually run XXXXX" to correct the error" but at least it tells you why you screwed up and offers a way to solve it...... anyone who is used to win 3.1 and win 95, and DOS should have no problems

so I got the LXLE ISO file from the web (free) got an ISO to bootable pen drive convertor program (also free) stuck the pen drive in the old tablet, intewrrupted the bios boot and made it boot from Pen drive, let it reboot and away it went cleaned the old xp and crap off the hard drive and installed itself.

took ages...watch a progress bar, and of course waiting for the "fill in your details" screen but then there it was done....of course the thing then needed to reboot to finish the install....connected to t'internet straight away once given the router (which it found instantly) password of course once it connected to the web it of course said "you have 458 updates available" so into the menu to find the update manager click and away we went .....except.......one of the updates had a series of options to pick from and I picked the wrong one and froze the whole thing....

aghhhhh.....so press the on off button for 10 secs to kill the machine then reboot.....and then we got the aforementioned error..which I duely corrected in the command line...and off we went again....all updates loaded and just got to find may way round the very XP like desktop.....

the old machine now runs fast and smooth and has a new lease of life

suddenly I LIKE linux..........