Nigeria Content Online

How do you keep
your old computer in use? Imagine having that eight year old box which
has a 700MHz CPU and 256MB of RAM? Do you throw it away?

Everyone knows that
the latest version of the popular Windows Operating System is a
resource hungry software that would not even install on older systems
let alone being usable. Weep not though; there is an answer to your old
system worries.

A light-weight
version of Ubuntu Linux has hit download mirrors everywhere. While it
is not yet officially supported by Canonical, the company behind the
world’s most popular Linux distribution, this version of Ubuntu has in
the last three months wormed its way up the Linux charts to become the
twelfth most popular version of Linux. The name of this light-weight
version of Ubuntu is Lubuntu,

To download
Lubuntu, just make a beeline to http://lubuntu.net and click on “get
Lubuntu”. The iso is a 521MB file that should be down in less than an
hour with a decent IPNX connection. When you have it, burn to CD then
pop it into your computer. Installation involves answering a few simple
questions, then going off to make that plate of Indomie while the
computer handles the rest.

Lubuntu’s default
look is geared towards making an easy transition from Windows. There is
a menu button at the bottom left of the screen and a tray at the bottom
right with a taskbar running across.

Sensible design

The creators of
this Operating System have sensibly chosen to include software with the
smallest possible memory footprints so that you can make the best of
your ageing hardware. As a result, the popular OpenOffice.org which is
the office suite included in most versions of Linux has been discarded
in favour of the more lightweight Abiword for word processing, and
Gnumeric for spreadsheets. If you feel more at home with
OpenOffice.org, you can install it through the Synaptic software
installer that comes as a standard in all Ubuntu based Operating
Systems.

For web browsing,
Lubuntu uses Chromium in place of Firefox. I love Firefox, but compared
to Chromium, Firefox is a snail. If you want to watch movies, Gnome
MPlayer is there for you, while Agualung is the default music player.
There is an image editor called mtPaint, but it can only do the most
basic of image editing tasks.

Testing Lubuntu in my test environment, which was a virtual machine
running on 256MB of RAM, the system clocks at 124MB with no programs
loaded. When watching a video from Youtube, the memory usage never went
above 200MB! Now try that with Windows 7.