I have an old single core laptop that doesn’t get a whole lot of use anymore, partially because it is dated (purchased in 2006) and partially I’ve never really adapted to using a laptop as a general purpose computer. Increasingly, however, I find myself in need of a laptop either when I want to get some work done when I’m away from home, or when I need to take my work with me. This being the case I decided to re-purpose my old laptop as a dedicated development machine.

I could have just put a fresh copy of Windows XP on it and gone from there, but given the circumstances that might not have been the best route. All I needed to run was apache, MySQL, PHP, subversion, and something to write code in. Clearly something more lightweight than Windows could accomplish this. In addition to this I wanted something that would mirror my production server, which is running ubuntu. I ended up installing lubuntu, a lightweight distribution based on ubuntu (if you plan on trying lubuntu bear in mind that it is still in beta). Other than some very minor bugs, lubuntu seems to be perfect for my needs: I could configure it to be almost identical to my production server, it is easy on resources (even on my ancient laptop), and I immediately noticed a big improvement with regard to battery life.