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.