Festive tales of resurrection

QI’ve had four Ubuntu desktops, but Santa didn’t bring me a Linux laptop for Christmas. I then remembered that about a year ago, an old friend gave me his beaten up (well, just superficial wounds, really) Dell Studio laptop running Windows 7. It took several minutes to boot up and was crammed with lots of annoying pop-ups. I used the DVD that came along with LXF231 to test 32-bit Lubuntu 17.10 on this Dell laptop and was amazed at the speed of operation. I had just two problems, now happily overcome. First, I found that it’s really difficult to remove a DVD from a laptop slide-in slot after you’ve formatted the HDD and deleted the old OS. Anyway I managed to install Lubuntu from the imprisoned DVD and I’m impressed with the results. Oh, the second problem is that the laptop’s Wi-Fi stopped working. I borrowed an external Wi-Fi dongle from a smart TV and plugged it into a USB port on the laptop. This enabled me to download a driver for the internal Broadcom Wi-Fi card and then (joy of joys) I saw the Wi-Fi LED on the keyboard lightup. I now have the Linux laptop that I craved, but Santa didn’t bring me. I love the minimalist Lubuntu desktop and the thin toolbar along the bottom edge, and all the apps are conveniently arranged into categories. No more scrolling down the Ubuntu launcher for me!

So, let me send a big thank you to the good folks at LinuxFormat magazine (and

not forgetting my friend who donated his old damaged laptop). Between you all, you’ve made a 70-year old man very happy this Christmas.

Pete, via email

AThanks Pete. Glad we could contribute some festive cheer. That Santa has much to answer for. In the old days optical drives used to all feature an emergency eject mechanism that you could prod with a handy paperclip. Slotloading drives tend not to bother with these, which means you need to load an OS to eject the drive, leading, as you discovered, to some frustrating Catch 22 situations. As mainstream offerings move away from 32-bit support it’ll be interesting to see how distros like Lubuntu and Bodhi evolve.