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Hello,

New member with a huge question. I've been a Windows user for nearly 20 years and frankly, I'm about done with them. They are slow and bloated. I recently bought a macbook pro which I absolutely love. I've thoroughly enjoyed getting to know the operating system and it has made computers exciting for me again. Now, while my main home PC, which serves as a "server" for the whole house will remain unchanged, I have a Toshiba Satellite A75-S209 laptop I bought new in 2004 that I'm toying with the idea of running Linux on to learn that operating system. The Toshiba was a powerhouse in it's day and I've maxed out the RAM on it.

Any threads on this laptop are years old, so I'd like to ask if there are any users here that have run a version of Linux on it and ask for suggestions on where to start. I intend to pull the HDD drive out that has XP working great and put in a new HDD to load Linux on so I can revert back if needed.

Thanks for any help users here have for a (potential) new Linux user.

Nunya

The first thing you will need to know if you have not already decided is which distribution of Linux to use. You can go to the distrowatch web site and see a listing of the most popular with links to their web pages. Here you can get more information on individual distributions. One important factor on older machines is the amount of RAM. You can find out the minimum hardware requirements for most major distributions by simply googling that with the name of the distribution. Might have difficulty running major Linux distributions without increasing RAM.

Here are some of the specs...

Processor

* Processor Intel Mobile Pentium 4 532 / 3.06 GHz
* Data Bus Speed 533.0 MHz
* Features Hyper-Threading Technology,
Enhanced SpeedStep technology
* Chipset Type ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 IGP

Cache Memory

* Type L2 cache
* Installed Size 1.0 MB

RAM

* Installed Size 512.0 MB / 1.5 GB (max)
* Technology DDR SDRAM - 333.0 MHz


I have 1 GB of ram installed...

If you ask 10 Linux users what distro you should start with, you will get 15 answers.

Just about any contemporary Linux distro should run acceptably on that hardware. Right now, I'm running CentOS v. 5.6 on a P3 256MB machine and it's noticeably a little slow, but it's stable.

I would suggest downloading some LiveCDs and experimenting with them, then picking the distro that feels right to you. Use it until you feel comfortable with it; that will give you a baseline of comparison if you decide to try something different.

Increasing the RAMs might help. More RAMs is always good.

Another option would be to use a lighter-weight desktop than either KDE or Gnome. I use Fluxbox on all my machines except the CentOS box (I'm using it for a personal project I'm working on and wanted to leave it at the default Gnome).

My two favorite distros are Slackware and Debian; I prefer stable over bleeding edge.

Google for "install linux on <your laptop here>"

If Linux is installable, then you should find installation reports, including what will work and what not. Since you have an older laptop chances are that you can install without many problems.

Do as frankbell suggests and check some sites to make a decision which distro to use. http://www.tuxradar.com/content/how-...t-linux-distro But also let weigh the distros you see in the installation reports. Once you are more experienced you can switch distro.

jlinkels

Thanks for the suggestions. I think I'm going to try out the latest release of Ubuntu and most likely check out mythbuntu.

Nunya

Just wanted to check in...I'm up and running and typing this on Ubuntu 10.10 on my Toshiba Satellite A75-S209. Looks like it is picking up drivers ok, but did receive a message that there are better drivers out there for $$$

Nunya

WHAT? Short answer is that shouldn't be. Can you clarify what drivers were on offer and who was doing the offering?

A little explanation...remember, I've been a Linux user for 30 minutes now :)

I don't have any proprietary drivers, but there was an update for the modem driver (which I don't use), but I did update it and everything was fine. I was running it from the CD, but am now pulling out my XP hdd and putting in a blank to install it permanently. Beauty of it, I can just swap hdd if I need to use XP for anything.

Nunya

I believe I have seen that as well. Sometimes such sites turn up if you enter search terms like "drivers for linux laptop <drivername>" Somehow google directs you to such sites. I am not sure that they actually sell you something you can't use, but for sure they sell something.

jlinkels

The only paid driver for normal hardware I know of is the Linuxant modem driver for crappy old Winmodems. Other than that, every network, video, sound and other drivers you need will be free, they might have restrictive licensing but won't cost you anything.

Yeah, that was why I had a start. If Nunya53 is using the normal Ubuntu process, then there should never, ever be a prompting to buy a driver. There might be restricted drivers like the Broadcom sta driver, but that doesn't cost anything, it just isn't an open source driver.

I never had a Winmodem, so maybe that is why I've never seen such a request.

I'm thinking he just mistook "non-free" for "$$$". When you see that, it doesn't mean something costs money, it is just means the licensing is restrictive, for example it might not be able to be modified or distributed by a third party.

I think you're right, Elliott...it did say non-free. Sorry for the confusion...I'm having fun with it right now.

Nunya