Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS, 12.04 LTS, 12.10 On An Old Laptop

Last week I shared how the open-source R500 driver can compete with the legacy Catalyst Linux driver on an old Intel laptop with ATI graphics, but how has the performance for other areas of the system changed with the latest Ubuntu Linux code? In this article are benchmarks from other areas of this Core Duo laptop when running Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and then a recent development snapshot of Ubuntu 12.10.

From the Lenovo ThinkPad T60 with its Intel Core Duo T2400, 1GB of RAM, 80GB 5400RPM HDD, and ATI Radeon Mobility X1400 graphics, the three Ubuntu Linux releases were tested in their stock configurations. Since the graphics performance was covered in last week's article, this article is mostly looking at the file-system and computational performance.

Namely coming into play is the Linux 2.6.24 / EXT3 / GCC 4.2.4 on Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS, Linux 3.2 / EXT4 / GCC 4.6 on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Linux 3.5 / EXT4 / GCC 4.7 on Ubuntu 12.10. The file-system mount options and other settings were at their defaults.