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Hello! I have a very old laptop that I'm giving to a friend. She works as a writer and can't afford to replace her old Mac right now.
I have an old 1998 laptop, and we thought we might get it to work for her by installing Linux on it. The main thing we need is a way for it to connect to the internet (preferably via USB adapter), but if we could get it to use a portable USB drive for storage that would be better than nothing. In its current state (Windows 95), it does not recognize USB devices. It has no wireless capabilities.
I tried installing Ubuntu on it, but the hardware seems to be too old for it.
If this project (getting laptop to recognize USB wireless card or just USB storage device) is even feasible, how should I go about installing Linux on this machine?
Hopefully your friend has intermediate/advanced Linux skills and is comfortable with the command line (no GUI), as these are the skills that will be necessary to install and use Linux on such challenging hardware. Modern GUI word processing software (such as OpenOffice) simply will not run with 32mb of ram.
There is some great information about Linux on very old hardware at this blog: http://kmandla.wordpress.com/ Keep in mind that the blog writer assumes intermediate/advanced Linux skills and enjoys spending many hours on this "hobby."
If you have any budget whatsoever for this project, I recommend recycling the Lifebook and purchasing an inexpensive second-hand computer from someplace like Craigslist. It depends on where you live, of course... here in New York, I regularly see computers in the $0 to $50 price range that will run circles around the Lifebook. If you can get, say, a Pentium 4 with 512mb of RAM, that should easily run most Linux distros (such as Ubuntu) and cost well under $100. This may be a bargain if you're a busy person, as you are looking at many hours of your own time trying to install Linux on the lifebook (and then training your friend how to use it, if she is not already an experienced Linux user).
Distribution: Dabble, but latest used are Fedora 13 and Ubuntu 10.4.1
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Originally Posted by juliajuliad
Hello! I have a very old laptop that I'm giving to a friend. She works as a writer and can't afford to replace her old Mac right now.
I have an old 1998 laptop, and we thought we might get it to work for her by installing Linux on it. The main thing we need is a way for it to connect to the internet (preferably via USB adapter), but if we could get it to use a portable USB drive for storage that would be better than nothing. In its current state (Windows 95), it does not recognize USB devices. It has no wireless capabilities.
I tried installing Ubuntu on it, but the hardware seems to be too old for it.
If this project (getting laptop to recognize USB wireless card or just USB storage device) is even feasible, how should I go about installing Linux on this machine?
BE CAREFUL. First, you have to have a specific version of windows 95 in order to install the drivers, second, you must install the drivers in a specific sequence.
If the laptop has a USB card in it, then maybe there is USB capacity already? You say that it doesn't recognize USB devices, but it doesn't make sense that the computer would have the hardware but not the software for USB.
Other than that, can you increase your RAM? Even 128meg gives you many more linux options.
Thanks guys! I'll look into getting more RAM. We're operating on a limited budget here, but I think that's feasible.
@linus72: What OS should I install if we get 512 MB? Or 1 G? I'm guessing at some point I would be limited by the processor speed, and we're not really looking to replace that. We just want it to do basic things, like type and access the library's wireless.
@moxiemann99: Thanks for the info about Windows 95 USB drivers! It's good to know that we can go ahead and install those if the Linux project doesn't work out.
The minimum hardware requirement in regard to RAM for most Linux full distributions (like Ubuntu) is 512MB with 1GB recommended. The problems with your computer are obviously the processor speed. I would not go over 512MB. I had a 10 year old computer which originally had windows 98 on it and the hard drive went bad. The computer originally came with 128MB of RAM. I had since installed more RAM and had 2GB. When I tried to install windows 98 again, I got a message indicating that I did not have enough RAM? I went to several microsoft sites to read about this problem and they indicated that windows 98 (and I assume earlier versions?) would not recognize more than 768MB of RAM. This link has a solution or workaround to the problem if you come across it: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/253912
Some additional choices: Slitaz very small system, no fancy gui, slax, nimblex, and a number of versions of puppy linux.
Seriously, I wouldn't recommend something like KolibriOS for anything...it's not a Linux (not even UNIX-like), and it's not really all that complete. Really its main focus was to create an OS with a GUI and everything entirely in x86 assembler. In my experience experimenting with in in VirtualBox, it didn't even recognize the virtual wired NIC that VBox provides to new VMs by default, so I would guess that you can forget about USB wireless.
As for a modern Linux with a GUI, yeah, you'll definitely need more memory, and CPU speed will more than likely be a bottleneck (233 MHz doesn't leave a whole lot of timespace for crunching through the amount of instructions required to run an X server at a decent speed ). If you can upgrade the RAM to something a little more "sane" (say 128 MiB), you might try a small, relatively minimal distro like Puppy. IIRC it's supposed to have decent wireless device detection, and this may include USB dongles (not sure though, it'll probably depend on the chipset of the hardware).
spend the $200 to $400 US and get a cheap modern "netbook"
and REMOVE the limpus light install
and install any of the major distros min. installs for "netbooks"
Another thing to consider is what's the max ram the lap top can support? An older laptop like that probably can't do more that 512mb. Not to mention, older ram can be more expensive than it would to just buy a better used laptop.
I would search around for options on e-bay or even cheap new that would be more useful than a P2 32mb lap top.
On the other hand... if you install a bare bones linux with only console and vim, you may get some work done. Even some very minor web surfing would be possible with something like 'links'
A quick google found the max RAM for this laptop as 160MB. As stated you will not be able to run KDE or Gnome. There are lightweight windows managers and distributions that would run on this computer and as suggested puppy might be worth a try. You might be able to find used memory at your local computer shop at a reasonable price.
Even some very minor web surfing would be possible with something like 'links'
I hate to seem picky about little minor issues like this, but frankly, text-mode web browsing sucks. If you absolutely have to browse the web in an 80x24 text-mode terminal, at least use something like w3m...it doesn't screw up page layout as much as links/lynx does.
Best solution would be for the OP to just upgrade their RAM or get a used lappy with better specs and install a distro with an X server bundled.
Well damn small linux says it will run with only 16MB of ram. So that or puppy or feather linux would probably be a good first try. You could also try getting a hold of an old release of one of the distros that were around then like slackware or debian. You would probably have better luck with those since they were made to run with those specs.
@ MrCode
Ok Ok then "links -g" at least that's a bit more useful
either way, I said "minor web browsing"
This implies you wont get anywhere on social networking sights but anything that's largely informative with out fancy stuff is going to be browse-able.
Anyway, on a related note. If you compile binaries on a more powerful machine, midori is actually working 'well' for me on 128mb of ram under fluxbox.
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