The old Windows PC resurrected with Ubuntu

Designed for Windows XP, but it runs Ubuntu.

I love buying gadgets, and I'm not one to deprive myself. My house has just about every piece of equipment I've ever lusted after, from a Mac Mini hooked up to an Apple Cinema Display to a Sony Bravia 3D TV connected to my PS3. I have a MacBook Air, PS Vita, iPad, Nintendo 3DS, Kindle touch—the list goes on.

I wouldn't want to do without any of them. But out of all my gadgets and computers, there's one I respect above all others, and it's an old piece of junk.

The Dell Latitude D620 pictured above has been a part of my life since mid-2007 when IDG, my previous employer, provisioned it to me to replace an older PC that died during a business trip. Running Windows XP, with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 100GB of storage, and 2GB of RAM, the exceptionally sturdy laptop was a damn good computer—for a while. It eventually slowed down, becoming an unusable mess and a malware magnet that had to be repaired and cleaned more times than I like to remember. And with a battery that lasted 30 minutes to an hour if I was lucky, it was not ideal for my schedule involving frequent work travel.

But when I got corporate approval to upgrade to a Lenovo ThinkPad Windows 7 laptop sometime in 2010, I wasn't quite ready to part ways with the old Dell. I convinced IDG to let me keep it as a test machine, as long as I wiped everything off the disk.

At this point, the D620 (which hit the market in mid-2006) took minutes to start up and a seemingly interminable amount of time to enter any kind of usable state. Obliterating Windows XP from the machine was a great joy, and I ran through several different configurations just for fun, trying out Fedora, Ubuntu Linux, and a dual-boot configuration with Windows 7. I even attempted to make a Hackintosh.

The Hackintosh turned out to be a pipe dream, as I could never control the mouse cursor long enough to make it through the OS setup process. I like Windows 7, and it ran perfectly well on the Dell. But the right tool for the job, you know. And for this computer, the lightweight Ubuntu was the right OS despite not being as fully featured as Windows.

I'm not a Linux expert, which may be why I find it easier to locate and install applications with Ubuntu's Software Center than I do with other Linux distributions. I was also amazed that a computer I thought was an old piece of junk could now start up in about a minute and enter a usable state almost immediately. I didn't waste my Windows 7 license, either, as I now have it running in Boot Camp and Parallels.

Alas, my “new” Ubuntu machine primarily sat unused in a corner. I occasionally turned it on, kept the software up to date, and was pleased to see that it could run the 3D version of Canonical's new Unity interface without any hiccups.

But a couple months ago I decided to put it to good use. I set it up on top of a bookshelf in my bedroom as an impromptu stand-up workstation. These days, I rarely power it off, keeping it in suspend mode so it only takes a few seconds to get it running. Unless I've carried my primary laptop upstairs, the Ubuntu PC is the only computer in my bedroom and perfect when I need to do some quick Web surfing or e-mail and want a real keyboard rather than a tablet.

I upgraded the RAM from 2GB to 4GB, carefully prying off the keyboard to insert the extra memory I purchased for about $35. I'm running the 64-bit edition of Ubuntu, but it turns out the computer can only recognize about 3.2GB of RAM due to a hardware problem that is unrelated to the operating system. The extra memory does seem to make it run slightly smoother, however.

But the computer has its limitations. Downloading and installing Ubuntu OS updates takes hours. It's been years since it could keep a charge, and it now runs for maybe 20 to 30 minutes when unplugged. Even the supposed “extra-capacity” battery I got for work travel a few years back degraded quickly to the point where it was no better than the stock one. But in my bedroom, it's permanently plugged in.

Just for the heck of it, I tried getting iTunes to run in Wine, the Windows compatibility layer for Linux. It technically ran, but with a messed-up interface that was unusable and brought the computer to a halt. The D620 is capable of running tiny Windows programs in Wine, but nothing substantial. I haven't tried running Windows in a virtual machine on this computer, so for now it's Linux software only.

And that's enough. My music can play in either Banshee or Rhythmbox. Printing over my wireless network works—occasionally. I can use the official Dropbox client for Linux, “Nevernote,” to access Evernote files, Calibre to manage e-books, and a BitTorrent client called “qBitTorrent” downloaded from the Ubuntu Software Center. I can sync website passwords using Chrome or my 1Password file stored in Dropbox.

The Evolution mail client works great with my Yahoo Mail. Evolution doesn't play nicely with newer versions of Exchange, so I used Chrome's application shortcut utility to create an Outlook Web Access icon for Ubuntu's application launcher sidebar.

One reason I love the computer so much is the comfortable keyboard and trackpoint, which I have found far superior to mice and trackpads ever since getting my first IBM ThinkPad running Windows 95 as a freshman in college. When I was running Windows on the Dell Latitude, I disabled the trackpad to avoid unexpected moves of the cursor. I wasn't able to figure out how to disable it with Ubuntu, but taping a pared-down business card over the pad accomplishes the goal.

If my other computers suddenly died, I could still do my job—in fact, I used the Dell Latitude to write this article. While my everyday writing tool is Scrivener for Mac, in this case I wrote in LibreOffice Writer on Ubuntu and imported the text into our content management system using WordPress's "paste from Microsoft Word" option.

This Dell Latitude won't ever be my primary computer, and it certainly can't become a high-end gaming machine. But it's almost perfect for what I need it for. And, just like my car, I intend to do one thing with it: keep using it until it literally won't work anymore.

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