I'm testing a Live-USB Linux **AntiX** on a Lenovo laptop that has always been sluggish running Windows 10 (and even running Debian from the HDD).

I don't know if the issue is related to the performance (speed/RAM etc) of the machine or to the HDD itself. To see how the machine performs separately from the HDD I'll use AntiX for general web browsing and email for a few days and see how I find it.

I've set up static root persistence to allow me to install and configure software, and save files etc. that remain after rebooting. This required setting up persistence :

rootfs = 3GB
homefs = 3GB

I installed rwho and rwhod to confirm new packages remained after reboot. I needed to change the default Live-USB user passwords to allow persistence to work - the first time I rebooted after setting up persistence I was forced to do so. I also added a new user, rather than stick with the Live-USB's default of demo

I then installed chromium as the preferred browser (instead of the default seamonkey)

To make it the menu-selected choice of browser I struggled to see how the menu item desktop-defaults-run -b (-b for browser) was made to point to chromium until I found one way (using the GUI control centre):

menu
control centre
preferred applications
web-browser --> /usr/share/application/chromium.desktop

chromium does not allow syncing to a google account any more, despite appearing to let you sign in to Google to initiate the sync.

I'll stick with chromium for this Live-USB version.

Email? : not sure I need to go this far, unless it turns out to be much more user friendly than the Windows10 OS from the HDD.

I hate “tap-click” on touchpads….

add :

# disable touchpad tapping for button1 
synclient tapbutton1=-1 &

to ~/.desktop-session/startup

After a couple of hours of using AntiX for Websurfing, You Tube and Dokuwiki editing I'm happy at the speedy response….

Let's see how it performs for other things ….

sudo apt-get install claws-mail

Change default prompt to a single line, rather than split across 2 lines: comment out default PS1 and copy/edit to look like :

PS1="$PURPLE\u$nc@$CYAN\H$nc:$GREEN\w$GREEN\$$nc "

if [ "$UID" = 0 ]; then
    PS1="$red\u$nc@$red\H$nc:$CYAN\w$nc\\n$red#$nc "
else
#    PS1="$PURPLE\u$nc@$CYAN\H$nc:$GREEN\w$nc\\n$GREEN\$$nc "
    PS1="$PURPLE\u$nc@$CYAN\H$nc:$GREEN\w$GREEN\$$nc "
fi

I prefer fluxbox for low-resource linux machines, and I'm using the zzz/fluxbox desktop which integrates the zzzFM file-manager. The default single-click-opens-files is annoying and I found the way to disable it is:

right-click on the ''File Manager'' desktop icon, 
select ''Desktop Settings --> General'' tab and un-tick ''single-click open files'' 
and do the same on the ''Desktop'' tab.

Page Updated: 02/07/22 12:04 BST