When installing my Raspberry Pis, I noted that another OS was available for download from the Raspberry Pi Foundation, namely a PC/Mac hardware version of their Debian GNU/Linux adaptation. Seen that on a RPi1B+ this OS run fine, I thought to give a try to install it alongside the FreeDOS partition. Before you try, this did not work... I could not boot later on.
As a test, I decided to overwrite the FreeDOS partition and install the Raspberry Pi Desktop on the entire disk. That in fact did work, i.e. it booted.
Nothing is straight forward in this world. Neither was the install of RPi Desktop. As I wrote, it booted, but, it did not show the menu-bar. Pretty useless at that stage.
Solution:
- press <ctrl><alt>t which will open a terminal
- now delete the directory ~/.config/lxpanel -- if you want to play it safe do this:
- cd .config
- rm -rf lxpanel
- now manually start lxpanel in the background by typing: lxpanel &
- you can now restart your computer by either typing reboot in the terminal of use the item in the menu
You might notice that the panel looks different to the rest of the GUI decorations. This can be changed by right-clicking on the panel and open the Panel Settings. In Panel Settings there is a tab Appearance. Click the radio-button which reads "System theme" . That should do the trick.
Another problem I ran into is hardware related to this particular laptop, namely the built-in broadcom b43 WiFi adapter. This is not generic to RPi Desktop, therefore, I wont further discuss the topic here.
RPi Desktop packaged in February 2020, hence, I highly recommend doing a full system update/upgrade.
Here is the easy way, in a terminal type
- sudo apt-get update - this updates the package manager's database
- sudo apt-get full-upgrade - this does what you believe it to do and may take a while
- reboot
Personally, I like the package manager "synaptic". Install it by typing sudo apt-get install synaptic in a terminal window. Once synaptic is installed, open it, it should be in the Preferences menu, and hit the "Reload" button. This again refreshes the database content. Hit the "Mark all Upgrades" button and when it is done the "Apply" button. After a reboot, very likely a kernel was installed, you might find the Raspberry Pi Bookshelf and other goodies in the menues.
My experience with RPi Desktop OS on this old Celeron M laptop is pretty good. Even Chromium performs OK-ish. However, Chromium likes to do stuff in the background, which drains resources and gives a slightly sluggish experience at times. It is certainly advisable to install a more lightweight browser.
LibreOffice and Thonny work nicely. Samba (smb) works out of the box and is integrated in the file manager pcmanfm. The openbox window manager leaves enough resources for other processes so that working in GUI applications results in acceptable performance. However, using a single CPU core laptop with just 512MB RAM, one should be cautious about the available resources, i.e. not too many heavy applications open at the time.
Classic work in terminal windows, such as writing code in a text editor, using make and running executable, is really no problem what so ever.
Earlier, years ago, I used this particular laptop with a pure Debian installation, which to the time was a good daily worker. Not much has changed, beyond the added tools.
So, if you are looking for an alternative OS for old hardware, give it a thought, maybe RPi Desktop is a solution for you.
