Shoutout for Debian! the McGyver os...

[eddie]

I was looking through the junk closet today and found an old gateway 2000 solo laptop that was given to me three or four years ago by a lady employee where I used to work. It is not much bigger than a netbook. The battery may still be in good shape. it has a 1 gig hd. 48 meg of ram and a whopping 120 megahertz of speed. Though it will run dsl, After a bios update, I was able to get the latest debian running on it like a charm. So thanx to all the debian developers that made it possible. The money schools could save if they only knew.

[Wally Balljacker]

What exactly can you do with a 120MHz laptop?

[eddie]

I hope that is a rhetorical question, because my answer would be what can you not do with it? Both a Model T and Vette will still get you down the road.

[mowestusa]

I used to run a Pentium 166 with only 32 megs of ram in CLI only. With that however, I could write just about anything, because I normally just us vim as my writing tool of choice. Since my job is a lot of writing, it worked great. I could also keep my schedule on it with wyrd and remind too. I should get that thing out again, and use it as my netbook instead of lusting after those sleek new machines.

Quick question, what did the bios upgrade enable you to do? My old Toshiba 166 won't boot from the CDROM, so I installed netbsd which has an incredible laptop floopy install.

[Claudio]

Just for kicks, I did a basic Debian netinstall on an old K6-300 Compaq Presario with 64 MB RAM, 4 GB hard drive, and S3 Virge video. I installed Xorg and XFCE along with Firefox and some other useful apps. I was quite surprised at how useful this computer felt compared to the copy of Windows 98 that was installed prior. Mind you, "Web 2.0" sites did cause the system to choke a bit, but on your everyday websites it handled them with ease. Even navigating through the DE was usable enough for everyday use. It's amazing that even after this many years, GNU/Linux (specifically Debian) can bring these old systems back to life.

[eddie]

I used to run a Pentium 166 with only 32 megs of ram in CLI only. With that however, I could write just about anything, because I normally just us vim as my writing tool of choice. Since my job is a lot of writing, it worked great. I could also keep my schedule on it with wyrd and remind too. I should get that thing out again, and use it as my netbook instead of lusting after those sleek new machines.

Quick question, what did the bios upgrade enable you to do? My old Toshiba 166 won't boot from the CDROM, so I installed netbsd which has an incredible laptop floopy install.

Actually, I did the bios update before I played with dsl. The bios update allowed me to boot from cd. Worse case scenario, I could of done a floppy install with etch. hmmm I would like to do a netbsd floppy install. Can you recommend any good tutorial sites?

[eddie]

Just for kicks, I did a basic Debian netinstall on an old K6-300 Compaq Presario with 64 MB RAM, 4 GB hard drive, and S3 Virge video. I installed Xorg and XFCE along with Firefox and some other useful apps. I was quite surprised at how useful this computer felt compared to the copy of Windows 98 that was installed prior. Mind you, "Web 2.0" sites did cause the system to choke a bit, but on your everyday websites it handled them with ease. Even navigating through the DE was usable enough for everyday use. It's amazing that even after this many years, GNU/Linux (specifically Debian) can bring these old systems back to life.

Cool....

[mowestusa]

I used to run a Pentium 166 with only 32 megs of ram in CLI only. With that however, I could write just about anything, because I normally just us vim as my writing tool of choice. Since my job is a lot of writing, it worked great. I could also keep my schedule on it with wyrd and remind too. I should get that thing out again, and use it as my netbook instead of lusting after those sleek new machines.

Quick question, what did the bios upgrade enable you to do? My old Toshiba 166 won't boot from the CDROM, so I installed netbsd which has an incredible laptop floopy install.

Actually, I did the bios update before I played with dsl. The bios update allowed me to boot from cd. Worse case scenario, I could of done a floppy install with etch. hmmm I would like to do a netbsd floppy install. Can you recommend any good tutorial sites?

Eddie,
I believe I just used the Netbsd manual. You download the Install CD for i386, and then download the floppy install images for a laptop, Netbsd 3.1 was two floppy images. You create the two floppy images using dd. Then boot from the floppies. When the install program asks for the location of the packages you point it to the CDROM (I believe the directions for that are in the manual) then the rest of the install is taken off of the CDROM. Of course you could set up an ftp server or network share as the source too if you wanted, then you wouldn't have to burn a CD, but I did not have a way to connect the old laptop to a network.

[Claudio]

Just for kicks, I did a basic Debian netinstall on an old K6-300 Compaq Presario with 64 MB RAM, 4 GB hard drive, and S3 Virge video. I installed Xorg and XFCE along with Firefox and some other useful apps. I was quite surprised at how useful this computer felt compared to the copy of Windows 98 that was installed prior. Mind you, "Web 2.0" sites did cause the system to choke a bit, but on your everyday websites it handled them with ease. Even navigating through the DE was usable enough for everyday use. It's amazing that even after this many years, GNU/Linux (specifically Debian) can bring these old systems back to life.

Cool....

Yes, it was pretty cool....too bad that I had to survey the equipment thereafter.

Now that I recall, it actually had Windows 2000 installed on it. Boy, was that thing slow!

[eddie]

Yes, it was pretty cool....too bad that I had to survey the equipment thereafter.

Now that I recall, it actually had Windows 2000 installed on it. Boy, was that thing slow!




Here in the states you can pick up p3's for nothing. even p4's with a full windows xp license are less than a hundred bucks.

[eddie]

I used to run a Pentium 166 with only 32 megs of ram in CLI only. With that however, I could write just about anything, because I normally just us vim as my writing tool of choice. Since my job is a lot of writing, it worked great. I could also keep my schedule on it with wyrd and remind too. I should get that thing out again, and use it as my netbook instead of lusting after those sleek new machines.

Quick question, what did the bios upgrade enable you to do? My old Toshiba 166 won't boot from the CDROM, so I installed netbsd which has an incredible laptop floopy install.

Actually, I did the bios update before I played with dsl. The bios update allowed me to boot from cd. Worse case scenario, I could of done a floppy install with etch. hmmm I would like to do a netbsd floppy install. Can you recommend any good tutorial sites?

Eddie,
I believe I just used the Netbsd manual. You download the Install CD for i386, and then download the floppy install images for a laptop, Netbsd 3.1 was two floppy images. You create the two floppy images using dd. Then boot from the floppies. When the install program asks for the location of the packages you point it to the CDROM (I believe the directions for that are in the manual) then the rest of the install is taken off of the CDROM. Of course you could set up an ftp server or network share as the source too if you wanted, then you wouldn't have to burn a CD, but I did not have a way to connect the old laptop to a network.

Thanx, I now have the iso and some docs.

[Claudio]

Here in the states you can pick up p3's for nothing. even p4's with a full windows xp license are less than a hundred bucks.

Yup, I'm in the US as well so I know what you mean. This particular machine was donated to the school, but I surveyed it out because it just wasn't viable there anymore.

[eddie]

I used to work at a local college. Every few months we sent a boatloads of pallets of perfectly good Dell gx110's and monitors to auction. I had to shrink wrap all of them. Broke my heart. If it was not written in stone that they had to go to auction, I would have put them to better use. The college now money strapped spent hundreds of dollars each for thin clients that the old Dells could have been easily converted to do the same thing. My brother who still works there teaching cs says that they are planning on leasing computers instead to get out of that mode. They now have multicore pc's in the computer science labs which is probably a good thing. The Dells could have been used in student study centers where all that is done is mostly web browsing and word processing. New machines and overpriced thin clients were not needed there.