[CoLoCo] Install Ubuntu on old laptop?

[Darrin Goodman]

A hobby of mine is to obtain old hardware and build functioning Linux
machines.  I have a number of "old" laptops, mostly PII's and PIII's,
all of which are running Linux.  There is nothing that I would rather
use than Ubuntu (or one of its derivatives); however, I have found
that the newer distributions often do not seem to work as well with
really old machines (PII's and PIII's with very little RAM).  Either
the newer 2.6 kernel doesn't want to play nicely with older hardware,
or the OS is just too robust to run on such very limited resources.
With that being said, my favorite distro to run on old hardware is
DamnSmallLinux.  There are a number of light-weight distros out there,
but DSL seems to be the most compatible with just about any
older-model laptop.  It's based on Debian (more specifically, it's
based on Knoppix), so you can enable apt-get and still install loads
of good software.  DSL uses the 2.4 kernel and seems to work better
with older hardware.  Once downloaded, it's in a Live-CD format, but
you can still install it to your hard drive if you wish to do so.  DSL
is lacking in the eye-candy department (in comparison to running
compiz on Ubuntu...), but it's still a powerful distribution,
especially for a 50 MB operating system.

Otherwise, on PIII machines (with >= 128 MB RAM), Xubuntu tends to
work well.  If you don't like DSL and Xubuntu still seems to be too
robust for your machine, you might try Fluxbuntu which is also a
light-weight distribution.

Old machines can be a blast to configure and work with.  Have fun!

- Darrin





On Nov 19, 2007 9:04 AM, Rick Ross <buddhadba at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have the same model, though I only have a 2GB HDD. I got Xubuntu
> Dapper and Fiesty to boot from the CD-ROM and install with few
> problems (those I did have were related to the CD-ROM itself, which
> has finally simply stopped reading, precluding my updating to Xubuntu
> Gutsy, so far). I've never done the floppy/network installation. Is
> there anything I'd need to know ahead of time? Thanks!
>
> --Rick
>
>
> On Nov 18, 2007 2:50 PM, Dave Price <kinaole at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Should be fine - some older lptops cannot boot from CD-ROM though, so
> > a boot floppy will be needed.
> >
> > Xubuntu may work a bit better than the Gnome or KDE flavors .
> >
> > Since this is a laptop, I am guessing that you really have a single
> > 5gb hard disk - that was partitioned when windows was intalled
> >
> > Rule of thumb: If it runs win95 or newer 'okay' ... Any flavor of
> > linux will run even better!
> >
> >
> > On Nov 17, 2007 9:40 PM, CHUCK SIMCOX <cpsimcox33 at msn.com> wrote:
> > >
> > >  Hi:
> > >
> > > I have an old laptop, see below, that I would like to install ubuntu onto.
> > >
> > > The system information shows what follows.  I don't know if other
> > > information is necessary or what it would be so let me know if more
> > > information is needed.
> > >
> > > What would be recommended for starters to get the feel of ubuntu?
> > >
> > > Chuck in Grand Junction, CO
> > > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > CompaqPresario1200
> > >
> > > System Type     X86 based PC
> > >
> > > Processor         x86 family 6 model 8 Stepping 3 Gunuine intel ~597.....
> > >
> > > BIOS Version     Phoenix BIOS 4.0 Release 6.0
> > >
> > > Total Physical Memory         126,448KB
> > >
> > > Available Physical Memory     52,980KB
> > >
> > > Total Virtual memory             422,308KB
> > >
> > > Available Virtual memory         288,496KB
> > >
> > > Page file space                     295,860KB
> > >
> > > Local disk (C:)                        4.21GB
> > >
> > > Local disk (D:)                     1.36 GB
> > > --
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> > >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > aloha,
> > dave
> >
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