A friend of mine has a laptop that he is going to get rid of, because it has Vista on it, is a few years old and runs quite slowly.

I am going to pop round there and show him Ubuntu 11.04, which I intend to live-boot from a memory stick. However, I notice that whenever I've done this in the past, Ubuntu defaults to the Unity desktop, which is significantly different to what he would be used to; plus the fact that I don't know my way around this new desktop and wouldn't be able to give him a confident demonstration of Ubuntu's capabilities.

Once installed properly, the classic Gnome desktop can be selected at the login window. However, this does not come up when live-booting. Is there a way I can switch to Gnome desktop while using live-boot?

The last person I demonstrated Ubuntu to, had an older laptop with limited graphics capabilities, so it booted into Gnome by default, as it couldn't handle Unity. So that was fine. This person did ask that I replace the laptop's XP install with Ubuntu, which I did and he's very happy with it now. So I am hoping for the same result with this other chap - but am hesitant on demonstrating Ubuntu using Unity.

Thank you for any advice you can give. I did try Googling this, but I guess it is too specific a query and I could not get any useful results.

Hi there,

well, that can easily be remedied. He could upgrade to XP. ;-)
(Yes, in my view that is an upgrade.)

Okay, this can not. Not easily, anyway.

Yeah, Unity is the reason I'm still holding on to Ubuntu 10.10 on my desktop machine.
Of course you can have the traditional GNOME desktop in Ubuntu 11, but that means you have to install it first. Preconfigured Live systems usually don't come with GNOME installed alongside.

My honest advice: Try Linux Mint 12 instead. It's also Debian based like Ubuntu, and the two are very similar. But Mint still comes with the usual GNOME desktop. I've played around with it for a few days now in a virtual machine, and it feels good, so now I made up my mind and I'll wipe my notebook (currently Ubuntu 10.04) and install Mint 12.

[X] Doc CPU

Well, I think this version does come with Gnome on it - I remember when I installed it on my machine, I could switch to it once Ubuntu was fully installed, but do not recall having to download Gnome first. And when I booted it onto my other friend's older laptop, it had to go into Gnome by default because the machine didn't have flashy enough graphics for Unity, so I know it's on there somewhere.

Might try Mint in future, when Natty support runs out, but for now I'm sticking with Ubuntu.

Anyone else have an idea whether I can switch to Gnome on live version...?

Why not go with Lubuntu, which is the lightest and fastest member of the Ubuntu family. It has a familiar "start" button at the lower left corner and a task bar at the bottom by default just like Windows. Of course, since this is Linux these things can easily be changed if you prefer.
I have a 6 year old Acer 3680 laptop which has a 1.6GHz Celeron CPU with 1.5GB RAM. It came with Vista and was slow as mollases. I run Lubuntu 11.10 32bit on it and is very light and responsive. As long as the Lubuntu devs don't decide to make Lubuntu bloated and slow the way that Xubuntu has become, I can likely continue with Lubuntu for at least a few more years on this laptop.

With 1.5GB of RAM I'm not surprised! But thanks for the tip about Lubuntu - I know about DSL and Puppy, but these are a bit different so it's nice to have a lightweight alternative if anyone gives me a laptop that is really out of date, and can't use regular Ubuntu.