LXLE : Boon for an aging laptop

I also own a Toshiba Sattelite L30 laptop. It has had its good run and now the hardware is noticeably older and cant really match upto the requirements of more recent operating systems. I cant imagine it to handle anything more recent than Windows XP, which itself has reached its end of life. Does that mean I cant put this old beast to any good use? Absolutely not! I looked around for the best fit OS for this machine and seems that my prayers are answered in form of LXLE.

LXLE, short for Lubuntu eXtra Life Extension, is a nifty thing sporting a lxde desktop and promises to be ultra light on resources. Thus making it ideal for older hardware. I have never used the lxde desktop and first impressions werent much. It is just another distro was all I thought until I started using it and the list of softwares that already bundled with it makes it ideal for usage right out of the box.

For first time I have actually noticed games bundled with a distro. And LXLE seems to have a long list of them to keep occupied when free. The graphics apps include GIMP, Shotwell and quick utilities for scanning and image viewing. For audio and video, we have apps like minitube, totem movie player, a screen capture utility, openshot video editor. The preinstalled audio program wasnt something I was comfortable with. I promptly installed Audacious on it.

Some more bundled programs were Firefox, FileZilla, Transmission client, Pidgin messenger, Uget download manager and the list would go on. I was struck by the thoughtful inclusion of so many programs in a distro.

I spent some more time looking around the system. It has some hundred assorted wallpapers and also a small utility to put up a random wallpaper at click of a button. Thats thoughtful.

Openbox is the windows manager for LXLE as well. As usual its bland and uninspiring. I started looking around for some good themes and icons options so that I could add some eye candy to the desktop. A few quick searches on box-look.org and gnome-look.org, i settled for the Windows8 open box theme and few set of flat icons.

The Emerald icons give a sleek look to the setup. Other noticeable ones are Square-Beam and Ultra Flat icons. Quick seach on gnome-look.org should get you there.

Find this Windows8 Openbox theme here

The Desktop is minimal and functional with task bar and a side panel to launch frequently used application.

All in all, I am impressed with how this has transformed my old laptop and made it more functional. The list of pre installed apps makes it dead simple to use out of box. Performance on older hardware is good but this thing would definitely fly on a newer machine with more modern hardware.

For all additional software needs just jump to the Lubuntu Software center to find your favorite apps and get going with LXLE!!

The only thing I havent able to get working is the sound, but that too is a hardware issue. Audio on Toshiba L30 laptops is poorly supported in Linux. Attempts to install new alsa drivers from source have failed. I followed some online forums for any sensible solution but have managed to get headphones working, that too with very low sound. All tweaks to get the speakers working have flopped so far.

But I guess I can live with it. This isnt going to be my primary machine and so its alright if sound doesnt work. But other things like wifi and mouse trackpad work perfectly. This L30 has sprung to life once again and will cater to all day to day basic computing needs. Thats all that counts!