Quest to find the best Linux for slow computers, Fedora 12 LXDE upgrade to 13

I replaced Kubuntu Netbook Remix (KNR) on my netbook with the LXDE spin of Fedora 12. KNR looks nice and has many nice features for devices with small screens but it was just painfully slow on my netbook. LXDE is (in theory) a more crappy-hardware-friendly Linux flavor, so I decided to give it a try.

LXDE's UI looks uglier and less flexible than KNR's, but performance is indeed better. With that in mind I put together a development environment based on a Fedora LXDE virtual machine I can use to test my own projects in Linux. Nothing terribly resource-intensive but things like Grails, Gradle, AppFuse, etc. I wanted to know if this VM would be fast enough so I could use it as my development environment.

Click on "Read more" below to check out the rest of this post on a development environment VM and instructions on how to update Fedora 12 LXDE with the unofficial release 13.




I know this approach adds some overhead when compared to a native development environment, but if the performance hit is not noticeable enough it could be interesting. For example, the next time I upgrade my laptop I can simply copy my VMs and keep my fully configured environment. Also, since all servers I work with are Unix-based, there would be more script reuse and less environment-specific issues (not that I get many of these, but some of my colleagues insist in hardcoding Windows-style paths sometimes). And lastly, I can keep project-specific VMs to organize my development environments. So far this approach has been working well for the past few days.

But I wanted to see how Fedora 13 LXDE is looking like (we still have few days before the official launch). Since I couldn't find where to download anything but the main version of Fedora 13 I upgraded a copy of my VM following these steps:

Update current libraries

su
yum update

Download and install Fedora 13 release RPM

a. Download this file: http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/fedora/linux/releases/test/13-Beta/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-13-0.7.noarch.rpm
b. Install it with the command below:

rpm -Uvh fedora-release-13-0.7.noarch.rpm

Verify the release has changed

cat /etc/fedora-release
Fedora release 13 (Goddard)

Upgrade all libraries to Fedora 13

yum upgrade -y

And after one hour or two I had a fully functional Fedora 13 LXDE VM. I just don't see lots of changes other than few icons and the wallpaper. I guess I will have to wait until the official launch... :(