I tried to run ubuntu 11.10 on our little HP Mini 110-3500, the GUI and Unity is clearly made for a bigger screen and didn’t really fly along. Probably because it only had 1Gb RAM to play with, even with Gnome3 it was still a bit of delay and lags as you tried to use it.

I did also find that the Chrome v14.something was struggling on a 64bit machine, not many people reported it. Though speed wise FireFox wasn’t that fast either.

So I was on the look out for something lighter on the system. I knew about Mint and other lighter version of ubunutu and linux. But when I spotted lubuntu I thought that I should give it a go.

I had seen online that there was some report that the HP Mini 110 have had it issues with the wifi. I also give it a go with the ubuntu install from the a USB stick along with dual booting with windows 7.

Windows 7 did run very well on the HP Mini 110 with 1Gb RAM, though I did spend a few hours removing all the bloatware and other crap that HP and Mickysoft thinks is essential for your computer experience.

The USB and dual boot was so easy to set up, plug in, a few clicks and a reboot later you had a laptop that could run ubuntu and windows. They have come a long way since I last had a stab at this, good work chaps.

Ubuntu 11.04 and later 11.11 was eating more RAM than 7 and it struggled a few time and it got a bit annoying to use when you had a few tabs open in Chrome and wanted to do something else.

I tried out Gnome instead of Unity but that didn’t make it much better, though the GUI was more suited to the small screen.

Since I found out that the wifi and other hardware wan’t the issue, I decided that an extra lump of RAM and a clean, no dual boot, install was due if I could find something that was lighter on the system.

Again the USB stick install of lubuntu was just a few simple clicks, give the laptop a name and create a user and you are running.

Lubuntu runs Chromiminium, however it is spelled, and a version below the official chrome which made surfing much more bearable again. The 1Gb RAM and the LXDE was much more friendly to the system, so we are flying again even with plenty of tabs open in chrome and other stuff running.

The only thing I could say is that the default mouse icons are rather ugly, so I had to changed that before it drove me nuts, else I’m very happy with it.