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I am a doctor by profession and currently enrolled in a postgraduate program. I started looking for a portable laptop instead of my own Dell Inspiron 15 because it was bulky and heavy to transport on a daily basis on public transport. My main expectations were accessing the internet for my online files, and regular work on an office suite. I had to prepare a lot of documents, presentations and patients’ records. Sometimes I had to work with spreadsheets for databases and analysis.
My wife had an Asus eee PC (1001PXD) netbook. It had an Intel Atom processor with 1GB RAM and came preinstalled with Windows 7 starter. It was an ideal travel companion but was not used for nearly 2 years due to a non-functioning keyboard and sluggish performance – which worsened over time.
I did my research in eBay and found a suitable keyboard for the system. Replacement along with a service brought it back to life, but Windows was no more an option due to speed. (Also I must mention that I hate their privacy policy).
Since I did not want to load the system with unnecessary software from the beginning (which would hamper a simple work environment), I chose to install Ubuntu minimal. Clear guidance in the reviews helped me to make the choice.
I downloaded minimal ISO 16.04, burnt it to a CD, and installed it into the netbook. The installation process was straightforward as it was similar to the installation of a regular Ubuntu distribution. I created manual partitions and wiped out Windows. During installation, network connectivity was needed and I had the options of wired or wireless, and I chose wireless despite the advice to do the other. It worked flawlessly. The server chosen was ‘local server’ (lk.archive.ubuntu.com). I decided to complete the installation first, reboot, and then choose the software I needed – so, at the end, I had a bare bones minimal installation in my netbook.
But, after the reboot, I found out the local server was not working properly and I could not download the packages I wanted. Then I tried to change the server with the “add-apt repository” command, but it failed as the terminal did not have that installed, which prompted me to install it. And it was impossible because the server was not working.
This made me install Ubuntu minimal for the second time. I kept everything else the same except the server – for which I now chose ‘main server’. At the end I chose to install Xubuntu’s desktop environment.
With the reboot, the netbook came to life with a bare bones Xubuntu, just as I preferred. I installed Libreoffice, Firefox, VLC media player, Software centre and Dropbox.
Currently, I’m happily using my newly refurbished netbook for all my work. The only problem with it is the lack of a client for Google drive, but I’m currently thinking of trying overGrive.