Elementary OS Challenge is over

My one week Elementary OS Challenge is over. If you recall,  I wanted to see if iI could do whatever I needed to do on an $80 laptop from Craigslist and a free Linux based operating system.

In short,  not a problem.

That's not to say that I didn't miss the extra speed of my regular laptop,  but if I had to do it, I could live with it day in and day out no problem.

Here's a brief list of what I did in this week:

Gmail
Google Calendar
Looked at some PDFs for lacrosse
Facebook
Watched online video podcasts
Listened to Pandora
Watched Hulu
Recorded and started to edit an audio podcast that I never ended up using.
Google+ postings
Twitter postings
Updated my blog (with this)
Edited my Evernotes
Played solitaire
Installed and referenced my password database - KeePass
Posted my minivan on Craigslist (hint hint)

And that's really about it.

I think I'm going to try another week or so and see what I think... of both the laptop and the OS,  although the keyboard has a decent amount of flex that makes it miss some of my  letters.  I may take it apart and see if I can put in some bracing in it.

Thanks for all your interest and comments.  If you have any questions,  feel free to contact me!

Regards,

Lyman

My Elementary OS / Craigslist laptop challenge

As you know, I finally got a working installation of Elementary OS, the new Linux operating system distribution, after a few false starts installing it.

After reading the back to school advertisements, chock full of fancy quad core laptops running Windows 8, I decided to see how cheaply I could get online.

So here's my challenge to myself:

Can I use my $80 Craigslist laptop and the no cost operating system Elementary OS for a week?

Now I can't use it for my work, because currently our VPN doesn't support Linux, but they supply me with a computer anyway. But when you think about it, pretty much everything that one does online, besides gaming, runs in a browser... Gmail - browser; Facebook - browser; YouTube videos - you got it... browser. Even if you want to write a document and print it, you can use Google Documents and Google Drive and do it all online.

Here is what an $80 craigslist laptop is... first a confession, I am a bit of a craigslist junkie - I scan the computer section nightly to see if any interesting (and cheap) equipment has been posted. I particularly like computers with weird features or sizes. I have an early Dell all-in-one that is still chugging along after 5 years or more of Lymie's homework and "other stuff." I am looking at a Dell Duo - a netbook with a rotating touch screen, and I am looking for a used Raspberry Pi to run as a digital photo frame on steroids. My name is Lyman - I have a computer problem.

Laptop specs - this was purchased from someone closing a business. This was a training laptop with a gimpy WiFi card. I decided to give it a shot (she was asking an absurdly reasonable $80 for this laptop), thinking at the worst I would add a WiFi dongle to it to get it online. It turned out it was a firewall issue - it took me 10 minutes to sort that out. The CPU is a dual core 1.6 GHz with 1.9 GB RAM and a 150 GB hard drive. Screen size is a common 15.6 inches at 1366 x 768. It connects via Ethernet or 802.11 G. Noting fancy but it works.

Elementary OS has all the stuff you need to get online - a browser, wifi software, a few basic applications and an app-store to get more. After installing Google Chrome and logging in (I do all my online stuff with Google) within 3 minutes I had all my bookmarks, my preferences and my extensions at my fingertips - auto-magically!

I put my regular laptop in  the corner of my office, booted the Dell Vostro and started creating this blog entry.

Check back in a week and see how I  did!

Thanks.