1.) Open Synaptic Package Manager.
2.) Enter Admin Password.
3.) Type "LibreOffice" into the search field.
4.) Follow the on screen prompts, clicking appropriately.
Seriously, if a user has rudimentary experience with WinXP then Lubuntu will not be too much to assimilate, and the only caveats are proprietary applications, yet there exists workarounds for most, such as comphoilio's netflix-desktop - which uses a special version of wine to run Silverlight and its necessary components - to enable viewing of Netflix DRM content on Debian based systems.
PS: Atom based netbooks with 1Gb are much more capable than P3/256Mb, people with such netbooks will have no issues at all with Lubuntu.
I'm running ubuntustudio fine on this Samsung NC10.
The Xerox Alto had this in 1982[1]. NINETEEN FREAKING EIGHTY TWO. How is it possible that any WYSIWYG word processor is allowed to ship without this?
I tried to port it to elementary with a new UI. Dear god.
Chrome is slow to start, videos don't load properly, ejecting the pendrive fails...
They can't legally be included in the distro itself, you have to go get them, which is a shame.
I mean, really, why would anyone switch from Windows to Ubuntu on a gaming machine? Just think about it for a sec.
(Videos not loading or USB not working are issues the OEM are supposed to handle. The fact that someone like GP can't tell even the series of their GPU hints strongly toward them using a prebuilt computer - yet expecting to be able to work as their own Linux OEM, which one could argue is more difficult than being a Windows OEM.)
Why Linux? Because coding (web stuff) on Windows sucks. Expandrive hasn't been working that well for me, makes explorer sluggish, etc.
Of course I didn't replace Windows - Ubuntu suggests you to install it along Windows (that part works really well these days).
See, the other day someone posted on HN that their Unity experience was bad because they had used a slow computer; I bought that idea and tried on the PC this time. (Then I went to XFCE, as usual. Which also failed on me, as I mentioned about the USB drive problem).
I should have videotaped myself installing and using Ubuntu - its just dozens of tiny UX mistakes that make me mad.
The problem is that everything has to work really well for a "power user" to use a computer happily. I can't believe someone that says the experience/aesthetics of Ubuntu matches that of OSX.
I absolutely don't want anyone to help me solve the problems (they were examples, there were dozens)[1] which you consider imaginary - my algorithm regarding Linux on the Desktop is to come back every 6 months and try it again).
(BTW, VLC works very well, I meant web based videos.)
[1] Small example: When I clicked "Install" on Synaptic, the button state didn't change until several seconds had passed, then the box asking for the root password pops up. By that time, I had already clicked it again several times.
https://twitter.com/Vryohpah/status/349126411845517312
Actually, opening this very tweet shows me squares instead of characters in some places. (It migh be "my fault" since I installed something called Infinality to improve font rendering. Oh well.)
As for the videos, if you aren't already, use VLC, it seems to have a trillion obscure codecs baked into it.. I would go so far to say if it doesn't play in VLC, there is either a problem elsewhere, or it's not a video file.
All of these "low-end" operating systems should have at least 1 GB of RAM as the bare minimum, and something with a more modern OS like Ubuntu or Windows 7 should use at least 2 GB of RAM, otherwise you have the same problem.
Interestingly, #3 is the home page of an old blogspot.com blog. It's mostly just text and a few inline images, and it still somehow manages to occupy 132 MB of RAM.
Firefox is lighter on the RAM usage these days especially with more tabs because of the sandboxing.
About:Memory in Firefox right now, with nothing other than this reply box open, shows JS using 67.29MB and well over 100MB of memory used for other purposes.
(Likely this is left over from tabs I have closed)
(Likely this is left over from tabs I have closed)
I think it's just general overhead, since I have similar figures when starting FF fresh with no tabs.
If you look at "window-objects" under explicit allocations, you can see the memory for individual pages; the page of your parent comment weighs 2.2 MB for me.
But that's without history... when you click links, it will keep the previous pages cached, and I think that is what can really eat a lot of memory real quick. But I would also hope that memory gets released without much of a fuss? I don't know that, but if the RAM is made available when system resources get low, I'd say cache away, since unused RAM just eats electricity for nothing :P
It can although I'd call it jogging rather than running. It can work on a P3 coppermine class laptop very nicely. However, a stock Lubuntu live CD does not come with LibreOffice.
Gnumeric is a nice spreadsheet, but Abiword normally does not have built in facilities for mathematical formulas, or for making drawings. There appears [1] to be no presentation application.
I hope the City are making some training materials available along with advice on installing LibreOffice. LO will jog on a 900MHz p3/256Mb one application at a time.
[1] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Lubuntu/Setup#Applications
Edit: I should say on P4 upwards or a Centrino laptop with 512Mb it will fly, and run LO fine with multiple applications.