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I have tried to install various linux distributions to my sisters laptop (Ubuntu Lubuntu lite MATE, Debian...) The only one that worked without hassle was Lubuntu 12.04 but I was not impressed with LXDE and I was also little concerned about the security of an old release. (My sister's windows laptop was really slow so I thought that this is my chance to convert her to Linux so I want to impress her.)

Almost every other distribution freezes during boot. I ended up trying Debian 8.6. The nomodeset boot parameter fixes freeze problems, but then resolution of desktop was horrible. If I installed firmware-linux-nonfree libgl1-mesa-dri xserver-xorg-video-atipackages, I was able to boot without the nomodeset option and the resolution of desktop was also good. However, booting doesn't always work. The machine often boots to command line and I couldn't figure how to start gui from there. (I tried startx but it didn't work.) I added acpi=off to boot parameters and boot problem went away. Now I was quite happy with result. I got newest version of debian release and gnome classic felt quite snappy. But the touchpad didn't work and I wasn't able to connect to wifi.

So, what should I do with this computer. Is it just too old for new Linux releases or is there some magic way to get it to work nicely?

Asus:

  • Model: X53B
  • MB ver: K53BY
  • RAM: 4 Gt, available 3.6 Gt
  • AMD E-450 APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics
  • Radeon HD 6320

I think my sister needs just basic web browsing, watching hd videos and office programs for school stuff.

Edit: I tried Xubuntu and it works well when I have nomodeset option in grub options. Only thing is that desktop resolution is little low. Is the problem with graphic drivers? How should I check what drivers I have installed and what drivers should I install. If I take off nomodeset, computer hangs to black screen during boot.

I don't know if I have two graphic cards but lspci | grep VGA outputs:

  • [AMD/ATI] Wrestler [Radeon HD 6320]
  • [AMD/ATI] Seymour [Radeon HD 6400M/7400M Series]
Lesenger
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1 Answers1

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I think the main issue in your sister's laptop isn't the graphics card or CPU. It's more likely the RAM. It'd be nice if you update your question with the amount of RAM you have, but I'll go ahead and write my answer as I think it could help anyway.

If the problem is indeed RAM, I can recommend you two distros can breathe life back into this laptop without any hardware upgrade.

  1. You can try out ArchLinux. It takes a bit of effort to install, but once you get past that, it's as easy to use as any other disto. It has an extremely tiny memory footprint by default. If I remember correctly, a base installation with Xfce4 uses about 90 MB of RAM after login. ArchLinux delivers upgrades faster than any other disto (as in several months earlier), integrates latest developments very quickly, and offers the AUR: an awesome repository of build recipes that automatically compile and build myriads of software that does not exist in the official repositories with one command.

  2. Puppy Linux. In the past, I used it to boot up a desktop computer that had a malfunctioning graphics card that caused everything else to freeze during boot. It's a distro specifically tailored to work with ancient and broken hardware, comes with most basic everyday life needs (along with a decent maintenance toolbox) out of the box, is extremely small (versions range from about 100 to 384 MB in size), can work with a tiny amount of RAM, and doesn't need installation at all.

Alternatively, if you are willing to invest any money into your laptop at all, consider adding a bit of RAM to it. It's probably absurdly cheap depending on how much the laptop supports, but even 1 GB of RAM will allow you to do everyday work like browsing the web, editing documents and images, and playing old games, so long as your base system's memory footprint is small enough (as is the case with the distros recommended above, without huge desktop environments).

Yamaho
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