[PLUG] Upgrading Ubuntu on my non-pae laptop - switching from xubuntu to ubuntu

[Dick Steffens]

On 05/23/2014 11:09 AM, Matt McKenzie wrote:
> My tale is similar but I ended up moving away from Ubuntu to Linux Mint.
> I did find a nice workaround for booting however that might be of help.
>
> I have a similarly old laptop, non-PAE, and doesn't boot from USB directly.
> It is a whitebox Compal CL-50, Centrino 1.6ghz, 1GB RAM.

Mine is an Acer Aspire 1640Z, Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.70GHz, 
2GB RAM.

> I found a solution to the booting issue, and not wanting to burn through a
> bunch of CDs/DVDs, by using PLOP boot manager[1] on CD, and then using that
> to boot from USB, and so I could then more easily change what I was
> actually booting with on the USB flash drive.

That sounds helpful.

> I read up on some of the solutions to try to boot Ubuntu with a non-PAE
> kernel, and tried a few different ways, which is one of the main reasons I
> wanted to do this boot method with USB flash. I was unable to get Ubuntu to
> work though, although the PLOP boot CD then booting from flash did work
> well.
>
> I decided to just go with Mint 13 LTS, which is the last version with
> non-PAE kernel (by default anyway), and since it is LTS will continue to
> get updates for 5 years.

I'll have to give that a try. I'm trying to standardize on mostly the 
same environment. If I can make Mint with GNOME look mostly like Ubuntu 
12.04, then I could probably live with that. The laptop is not going to 
get heavy use. I usually will sit in the living room and be available to 
look up stuff on the web. I also use it to connect to myth-web to 
schedule recordings on my MythTV installation.

The other use the laptop gets is when I travel. I copy my entire 
Thunderbird profile to the laptop so nothing changes with e-mail. Then, 
when I get home, I copy it back to my main machine.

> As for your issue of having installed Xubuntu, and wanting to just install
> the Ubuntu gnome packages- my first question would be, have you made sure
> your sources.list is updated to pull from the internet servers and not just
> the install CD? This is running from a full installed Xubuntu system right,
> not just the install CD?

Yes. The first two entries in /etc/apt/sources.list are the cdrom, and 
are commented out. Most of the rest of them point to 
us.archive.ubuntu.com, or some variation.

Knowing that I can get GNOME after a standard Ubuntu install, I decided 
to try:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

That is progressing as I type. We'll see how it works after lunch.

Thanks for your help.

-- 
Regards,

Dick Steffens