Something from (almost) nothing.
Posted 08-22-2013 at 02:02 PM by linuxpokernut
I was gifted this little laptop by my brother. He works for a computer repair shop and this was "garbage" from a customer...
As you can see, its not the best but certainly not ready to meet the mighty trash heap yet. It was in pretty bad condition, but I knew I could find a use for it. There was no power adapter, no optical drive, no hard drive, and a locked bios. So I got to work...
First order of business, it needed power. $10.64USD on amazon.com for the adapter. Not bad at all IMHO. I decided to not purchase a hard drive for it, and use a flash drive instead. I had a PNY 8GB micro drive, it cost about $7USD, perfect for the job. I tried a couple of live distros on it, but most would not boot. After a bit of trial and error, I decided on Peppermint 3. Slackware is my preferred operating system, but Peppermint 3 was much more suited to this application.
All I needed now was to get the OS onto the flash drive. I could have put the .iso on the flash drive and then cleaned it up, but decided when working with such a limited space to just use a USB DvD reader to install it. Installed without a hitch, and was on the desktop in a reasonable amount of time (for USB 1.0).
The last thing I did to get it running the way I wanted was a quick
The peppermint desktop takes up too much memory on this little thing, and fluxbox is my preferred window manager anyway.
I have a 16GB microSD card in my android that I use for storage. I put all kinds of Dungeons and Dragons (pen and paper) manuals on there and and now using this laptop to play AD&D with my son and brother, and for basic document printing and internet access. For under 20 bucks I have a nice little 'toy' thanks to open source.
The best part was going to the college district to buy dice and get pizza with the kid! All in a days work I guess.
Code:
minip@minip-ThinkPad-X40 ~ $ cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 9 model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1300MHz stepping : 5 microcode : 0x5 cpu MHz : 600.000 cache size : 1024 KB fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 2 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 tm pbe up bts est tm2 bogomips : 1196.18 clflush size : 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes : 32 bits physical, 32 bits virtual
Code:
minip@minip-ThinkPad-X40 ~ $ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1275420 505980 769440 0 3048 156132
-/+ buffers/cache: 346800 928620
Swap: 1300476 0 1300476
First order of business, it needed power. $10.64USD on amazon.com for the adapter. Not bad at all IMHO. I decided to not purchase a hard drive for it, and use a flash drive instead. I had a PNY 8GB micro drive, it cost about $7USD, perfect for the job. I tried a couple of live distros on it, but most would not boot. After a bit of trial and error, I decided on Peppermint 3. Slackware is my preferred operating system, but Peppermint 3 was much more suited to this application.
All I needed now was to get the OS onto the flash drive. I could have put the .iso on the flash drive and then cleaned it up, but decided when working with such a limited space to just use a USB DvD reader to install it. Installed without a hitch, and was on the desktop in a reasonable amount of time (for USB 1.0).
The last thing I did to get it running the way I wanted was a quick
Code:
sudo apt-get install fluxbox
I have a 16GB microSD card in my android that I use for storage. I put all kinds of Dungeons and Dragons (pen and paper) manuals on there and and now using this laptop to play AD&D with my son and brother, and for basic document printing and internet access. For under 20 bucks I have a nice little 'toy' thanks to open source.
The best part was going to the college district to buy dice and get pizza with the kid! All in a days work I guess.
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