My six year old daughter has shown interest in computers. In 2016, we bought a Kano for her and she loves it. So I decided she might like to have her own laptop. We happened to have a Dell Mini 9 from 2011 or so that we’re not using anymore. I figured that would be a good Christmas present for her.

Selecting the OS

The laptop still had the Ubuntu install that shipped with it. I could have kept using that, but I wanted to start with a clean install. I use Fedora on our other machines, so I wanted to try that. Unfortunately, Fedora decided to drop 32-bit support since the community effort was not enough to sustain it.

I tried installing Kubuntu, a KDE version of Ubuntu. However, the “continue” button in the installer’s prepare step would not switch to active. Some posts on AskUbuntu suggested annoying it into submission or not pre-downloading updates. Neither of these options worked.

After a time, I gave up on Kubuntu. Given the relatively low power of the laptop, I figured KDE Plasma might be too heavy anyway. So I decided to try Lubuntu, an Ubuntu variant that uses LXDE.

Installing Lubuntu

With Lubuntu, I was able to proceed all the way through the installer. I still had the “continue” button issue, but so long as I didn’t select the download updates option, it worked. Great success! But when it rebooted after the install, the display was very, very wrong. It was not properly scaled and the text was impossible to read. Fortunately, I was not the first person to have this problem, and someone else had a solution: setting the resolution in the GRUB configuration.

I had not edited GRUB configuration in a long time. In fact, GRUB2 was still in the future, so I had to find instructions. Once again, AskUbuntu had the answer. I already knew what I needed to add, I just forgot how to update the configuration appropriately.

Up until this point, I had been using the wired Ethernet connection, but I wanted my daughter to be able to use the Wi-Fi network. So I had to install the Wi-Fi drivers for the card. Lastly, I disabled IPv6 (which I have since done at the router). Happily, the webcam and audio worked with no effort.

What I didn’t do

Because I hate myself, I still haven’t set up Ansible to manage the basics of the configuration across the four Linux machines we use at home. I had to manually create the users. Since my daughter is just beginning to explore computers, I didn’t have a lot of software I needed to install. The web browser and office suite are already there, and that’s all she needs at the moment. This summer we’ll get into programming.

All done

I really enjoyed doing this installation, despite the frustrations I had with the Kubuntu installer. When I got my new ASUS laptop a few months ago, everything worked out of the box. There was no challenge. This at least provided a little bit of an adventure.

I’m pleasantly surprised how well it runs, too. My also-very-old HP laptop, which has much better specs on paper, is much more sluggish. Even switching from KDE to LXDE on it doesn’t help much. But the Mini 9 works like a charm, and it’s a good size for a six year old’s hands.

After only a few weeks, the Wi-Fi card suddenly failed. I bought a working system on eBay for about $35 and pulled the Wi-Fi card out of that. I figure as old as the laptop is, I’ll want replacement parts again at some point. But so far, it is serving her very well.