Episode: 3285
Title: HPR3285: Upgrading Lubuntu on my Samsung N150 Plus netbook
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3285/hpr3285.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 20:12:37

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3,285 for Friday the 5th of March 2021.
Today's show is entitled Upgrading Ubuntu on My Samsung N150 Plus Network.
It is hosted by MrX, and is about 18 minutes long, and carries an explicit flag.
The summary is Ubuntu 16.04 LTS at 20.04.1 LTS Upgrading Samsung N150 Plus Network.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by Ananasthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
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Hello and welcome Hacker Public Radio days.
My name is MrX, and welcome to this podcast.
It's pre-usual and I'd like to thank the people at HPR for making this service available
to us all.
HPR is a community-led podcast provided by the community for the community.
That means you can contribute to.
Why don't you pick up a microphone or a mobile phone or a addictive phone or anything
you've got to hand, hit the record button and send something in.
It's really quite easy.
I've gone to a lot of effort to make it simple and slimline the whole process and you might
find it quite therapeutic.
As I do anyway, it's late December 2020.
The thing is still going on.
I recorded a previous episode which hasn't gone out neither this one yet.
I'm guessing this will be a second follow-on one to the previous one which hasn't
gone out yet.
I will try in this occasion to speak a little slower, a little less frantic, trying to
clip my audio because I did notice I was a bit of clipping going on, so I backed out
off a little bit.
I think it was all done in a bit of a rush, so I'm a bit more relaxed at ease with the
audio.
So moving on, in this episode I'm going to cover, I've been upgrading my machines because
I've got a wee bit of time on my hands at last and the second machine I'm upgrading
this and this occasion is my aging Samsung N150 Plus netbook.
I got given it from Mrs X, I'm sure I've mentioned this to you before, and there's one
thing about it that I thought it was quite surprising, and so she got it and it came with
Windows 7 and it ran for about over a year, something absolutely fine, and I think it
was just after the year, after the warranties up off course, but it started to run slower
and slower and slower to the point where it would take forever to boot up, I mean just
took forever.
Well, I've not got any use for you, you can just have it, so thank you very much.
So we still got Windows 7 on it, but I put a partitioned down and installed, I think
it was the Ubuntu installed in originally, I can't remember that, I think that's maybe
the second time, there could be a third time I've upgraded the Ubuntu, but the point
is anyway, that once I installed Linux on it, it was absolutely fine, and it's never
slowed down, now I'm sure a lot of you might be tempted to blame Microsoft for this, but
I don't think it is, I think it's the suppliers of the netbook, whether it's the shop or
Samsung itself, but it must be the software that they're installing and this thing is
actually, I suspect it's, although I have no categorical proof, but I suspect it's set
to make the machine run like a bag of old nails after a year or so after the warranties
gone, and there's no need for that, I mean that's just verging and being criminal really,
anyway, that's my rental, but this is about the upgrade, my third upgrade I think, at least
the third upgrade to this Samsung, and so I'm going from, I was going to upgrade from
Ubuntu 1604 LTS to 2004, I ended up 2004.1 LTS, so the first thing I did, I copied all my
important documents and files onto Hard Drive, just to back up just in case things went wrong,
and then I had to be digging around and I found that, I think now I'm sorry, I've not done a lot
of research after the fact, I was just, as per usual, just keen to get the thing done,
but when I Googled, I found that an upgrade really wasn't possible from 1604,
Ubuntu 1604 to 2004, and this is, I think because the Ubuntu team switched desktops or something
like that, everything, obviously things were a bit of a flux, they switched to a different
desktop environment, and it wasn't really possible to, they said if you did it, we'd end up with
a non-booting machine, I seem to remember, I don't have a link for that, I don't know where I
read that, it was just something I Googled at the time, so it was just as well, I backed up on my
files, so I downloaded a fresh version of Ubuntu 2004.1, and I found a spare, well I found a 32GB
USB stick, I had to then copy all the files from that into a safe place, and then, of course that's
all takes time, I opened the download image using disk image writer, I think this is the first thing
I've actually used that, I can't remember how I did it in the past, whether it was DD or something,
I don't know, but it was very easy, very easy, there was quite a press with, I think it's something
I've never really thought to use before, for some reason, I'm not sure why, but anyway, I'm
sure you've already found that to be the case, and I'm probably slowing up, take to use image writer,
yep, so I switched on the laptop, hit F2 to check the boot, order and whatnot, and it was
said that it's a USB, and I booted from the USB stick, it's a live distro, and so I tried a few
things out, I found that the mouse speed was really slow on the track pad, and I was trying to
adjust it, but it didn't seem to make a difference, I discovered what it was later on, so I'm going
to cover it later on, I corrected the Wi-Fi, and the Wi-Fi connecting icon in the process was a lot
more, seems a lot more clunky than, not a lot more, a bit more clunky than, and I ended up going
through the menus a few times, you've got to kind of do a single scan sweep, and then pick the
work things if it finds, but it just seemed that, unfortunately I didn't write any notes on this,
but I do remember it being a bit, a bit, seemed a bit, a lot more clunky than it was previously,
however, it had connected, it was fine to that, that seemed okay, I went to YouTube and played a
few videos just to make sure that they worked okay, the volume keys worked okay to adjust the volume
up and down, not particularly important, but I've got volume keys under the notebook, so I thought
okay, that's good enough, I'm not using it for very much, just for simple SSH again to things,
and cutting and pasting a few things, some Firefox or something, but it's scripting or whatever,
as well, so that would be fine, so I went through the install process, and I selected a manual
partition, because I couldn't make head nurse sense of, I wasn't sure what it was going to do,
so I thought well, I'm playing a save, so if I do it myself, then I've only got myself to blame,
but if I leave it to, for it to decide, then it might go haywire, it's what I usually tend to do
actually, to be fair, I usually do it manually, so I use the existing partition, and so I form
into the existing Lubuntu partition, and the swap partition, which is on SDA6, and so then that
was fine, went through the whole process, it was slow, it took a long time on this wee netbook,
but eventually it completed, and booted the thing up, and what I was kind of surprised, and
maybe it's because I do these upgrades, these installs so infrequently, but it remembered the Wi-Fi
connection between boot, so that was nice, that was nice touch, so then you need to go through
arduous nonsense of trying to connect again, and I was thinking about doing a full upgrade,
it didn't give any details, so I wasn't quite sure, was it going to go from 2004 to 20.10,
which we've taken out to the LTS release, because remember this is 2004, I like to stick to LTS,
releases could I, such a nuisance to upgrade, so I wanted it to last as long as possible,
so I was wee bit reluctant, but I said yes to that, and at the end of the full upgrade as they
called it, after the first boot, I tried to do LTSB underscore release, of course that didn't work,
because that's been something's happened to that, just like on my previous install for the
pie, so I did cat slash Etsy slash OS dash release, and yes I was still running 2004 LTS, so that was
good, excellent, the login screen has an option, has a desktop option, but by default it's set to
LeBoon2, now I don't know what that means, what desktop environment it means, I'm a bit,
I mean I know I'd recognise no more thing, I think I'd recognise KDE, but I'm a bit rusty with
all the different desktop environments, so I don't actually know what the default LeBoon2 desktop was,
but anyway the default one I found it to be really slow and unresponsive, it was fast enough,
but it was a bit slow, and I also found that the the decoration around the terminal windows were a bit,
it was a bit clunky, and obviously it's a wee network with a small screen, so that made it,
meant that things tended to wrap on the screen, and I mean I'm sure I could have
maybe, there's probably options to tidy things up and everything, but I did think it was a bit,
a bit clunky, on such a small screen, so on that boot screen I tried one of the other
desktop, and I think there might only been one more I can't remember, but there was one LXQT,
so I picked that one, I was also pleased to find it when I rebooted it, it remembered that setting,
which was quite nice, and it was a bit more responsive, and the terminal screen was much tidier,
the text didn't wrap, and the whole experience was much more fluid, still not as quick as the previous
LeBoon2, I guess it's just everything gets a bit fatter and it's a really old netbook, so
what can I expect I guess, but certainly usable, so that's that's the main thing, I'll look,
so that's fine, what I found was, I was seeing the mouse speed was too slow,
and I was kind of thinking that the mouse and trackpad were the same thing, but they're not,
of course, silly me, there's actually an option for the trackpad, so it was in preferences,
LXQT settings, keyboard and mouse, mouse and touchpad, acceleration speed, and I think it was
set to 0.1, it's now set to 5, I just think, oh and I also selected single click-tactivity items,
I just felt that the interface was a wee bit, you know, I felt maybe that for somebody who was
just starting now, they might find some of the interface a wee bit more, so they're confusing,
if you're a seasoned LX user you'd be fine, but I don't know, I thought it was a cleaner,
simpler with a previous living to, just my general observations, could be me of course,
I installed some of my favourites like Midnick, Commander, NCDU, Screen, PV, MOC, SSH,
Generators at my RSA keys that I could log into my Pi 13 upstairs, no problems,
I copied all my files and documents from my portable hard drive back onto the laptop,
now this time, because I had installed MC Midnick Commander, I thought I'd use it,
and oh I was surprised how good Midnick Commander was, actually when I was copying the files
off the laptop, the netbook, it crashed a couple of times, and I had to split the job up
because it locked up a couple of things, it was probably due to limitations of RAM and whatnot,
but also with the trackpad and whatnot, it's so easy to lift your finger off and, you know,
put things around, I generally use control C, control V when I'm using file managers like that,
I don't like moving things out of the mouse because it's so easy to put something in the wrong
place, let it go, bang and off you go, you made a disaster, you know, but Midnick Commander was so
nice, it gave a constant percentage of the progress of each individual file being copied,
an overall progress which was also very useful and reassuring, was such a slow laptop,
with a GUI file manager that comes with Lubuntu, I wasn't actually sure for a long time whether
the machine crashed or not, where you would instantly know with Midnick Commander, I had no
crashes at all with that, it just ran completely smooth, completely fast, it's just, you know,
if you're going to be doing things like that, I thoroughly recommend Midnick Commander,
I don't use it and I did the basis to be fair, but for something like that, I guess it's
one of these things, if you use the right tool for the right job I suppose, you know,
yeah, so finally some general thoughts and observations, I might be able to cover some of this,
the keyboard screen brightness buttons, keyboard buttons don't work anymore, there's a
keyboard, quite a nice keyboard to capture facility where you pick the option and you say
and you hit a button and then when you hit a key, it picks up the key combination that you're
pushing it in and then records it, so that's fine, and I thought maybe it wasn't recognising the
function key followed by the brightness up and down button, but it turned out it wasn't that because
it also tells you the command of it, it's not running to do the action, so I pasted that command
into a terminal and it didn't push the brightness up and down, so it's something else that's
fault, now I haven't looked into that and I may not even bother because it's not that big a deal,
but it worked with the previous version of Lubuntu, boot time is much, much slower than the
previous Lubuntu, maybe twice as slow because it was quite snappy booting up previously,
it still feels a lot sluggish now, but I think it's perfectly usable, I've got a feeling
this might actually be the last upgrade of the Snitbook series, it's now getting a bit long in the
tooth, it's got limited RAM and processors pretty low grade and it really is quite a few years old
now, and of course the power switch is a snapped off a number of years ago, I've quit using
a pair of scissors to turn it on, so it really is getting past it, but for now perfectly usable,
well that's basically it I think, I have much else to add, I don't know when this is going to
go out, but I hope you all have a Merry Christmas when it comes, a nice new year and you all stay safe
and whatnot, and this could be months before this gets posted, so it could be meaningless that,
thank you very much and all the very best for now, if you want to contact me, I can be contacted
at MrX at hpr at googlemail.com, that's MRX, AT, HPR, the at symbol googlemail.com, so until next time,
thank you and goodbye.
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