Lightweight OS for NC10

Cheetah Designs · 6 Mar 2013 at 21:53

I have a Samsung NC10 with 1GB RAM. Only want to run Chrome on it.

What OS, that I can install that is easy for me to get Chrome running on it and is lightweight, and most importantly, can be installed on the hard drive (ChromeOS can't)

JonJ678 · 6 Mar 2013 at 22:07

Ubuntu is the usual choice for someone looking for a minimum-effort solution.

I ran Debian on my NC10, with various directories mounted in tmpfs (a ram disk) - that "felt" very quick because the latency was so low. Despite having all of gnome installed.

Slightly more hassle would be a minimal Debian install, then install something like fluxbox as a window manager. That would be better than an out-of-the-box Ubuntu, but doesn't fit "easy" as well.

Cheetah Designs · 6 Mar 2013 at 22:20

Got Ubuntu on there at the moment and it seems very slow.

Number_25 · 6 Mar 2013 at 22:33

JonJ678 · 6 Mar 2013 at 22:45

Well, yes. Ubuntu is slow. You asked for easy, not for quick. You can install a lighter window manager instead of gnome (I like fluxbox), but you're still running on a base of Ubuntu. Which is easy - but a bit crap.

Debian is harder. But better. Even with Ubuntu, if you'd like to try putting things in a ramdisk (the cache of chrome, or even the executable itself, would seem like a good choice), add lines similar to the following to /etc/fstab

none /tmp tmpfs defaults,size=64m 0 0

There are pages online describing putting firefox entirely into ram, which are probably applicable to chrome. That would be very fast, provided Ubuntu doesn't eat the rest of the ram and then fall over - which it might.

Number_25 · 7 Mar 2013 at 13:09

Cheetah Designs said:
Got Ubuntu on there at the moment and it seems very slow.

Unity feels slow on my i5-3570k.

I don't understand why they've gone in this direction, but there is a way to return back to the GNOME 2.x system everyone knows/loves.

manic111 · 7 Mar 2013 at 15:54

Number_25 said:
#!

+1

moss · 7 Mar 2013 at 20:28

Number_25 said:
#!

+2 for Crunchbang, I've got it installed on pretty much all my PCs/laptops.

Woden · 7 Mar 2013 at 20:30

XFCE version of Linux Mint.

inSilica · 9 Mar 2013 at 19:16

You say easy for you to get chrome on, that is pretty much all distros.

With respect to lightweight, all distros can be lightweight. E.g on Ubuntu install open box and log into that instead of gnome or kde. If you are only using chrome try a lightweight tiling windows manager, e.g i3 or dwm.

Radiation · 16 Mar 2013 at 18:25

Lubuntu is probably the best choice for easy and lightweight, you may need to install a few things that ubuntu has by default, like firefox instead of chrome, restricted extras for codecs and flash, maybe vlc and nautilus if you prefer that file manager.