Hello everyone!
I never gave up using linux or stopped reading this and similar forums but it was a while without posting anything here. This time I decided to share my success story about bringing to life this old Toshiba A50 with Linux Maya Xfce Edition (Mint 13 LTS, 32 bits release).
So, finding myself short of cash and after reading and reading a lot a series of articles about recycling and reusing old pieces of junk... er, technology, I decided that I needed a laptop but, as I've mentioned it, I couldn't afford one right now (even a tablet for less than $200 was out of question :-().
So I started to talk to my relatives, if they had some old piece of... you know, a desktop, a laptop, something they didn't use anymore and that they would be willing to give or just borrow.
My sister in law had this very old and malfunctioning (the keyboard is useless, since the enter key, the space, the letter 'p' and 2 or 3 more keys are damaged) Toshiba A50 Satellite that she bought back in 2004. So I decided to pick it up and see what I could do with it!
But I had to get a keyboard – lucky for me, I was able to get one Lifetech keyboard for just €8 – the cheapest I’ve found! And the problem with the enter and the space keys (which was a major issue, really!) was part of the past ;-).
First of all, I sent to hell the XP that was on this machine - obsolete, unsecure, not an option at all, nowadays.
Secondly, I went for Linux Mint iso and there, I made my first mistake: I didn't realized this was a laptop that required a non PAE kernel! So, when the installation went wrong I googled about it and rapidly found that I should be getting xubuntu or some other ubuntu 14.04 based distro, since that was the one with the latest non PAE kernel!
But I've never liked very much the Ubuntu distros - they're super easy to use and the community is huuuuuuuge, that's for sure! But it lacks some elegance that you find with just one look into Mint world.
So off I went to discover that LMDE is all non PAE kernel.
The install went for many many minutes (I think it went for more than 30 minutes or so) and, when I login to my Mint fresh install I notice that CPU was always been under heavy use and the system lag some performance.
I decided that Xfce would be better so I went to download the Linux Mint 13 Xfce edition iso.
This time the installation went for slightly less time (but also for more than 15 minutes, that’s for sure!) and after loging in I could start to have fun and play with my new toy – a «brand new 2004» Toshiba A50 was brought to life again.
So, this will be (I hope it can stand and deliver) my laptop for this entire year. On it, I hope to create my lesson plans, my students exams and tests, browse the net, create some amazing presentations and all the stuff you expect to do with a computer (maybe I can afford some time to use brackets...).
I’ll hope to post here, in the future, the results from this experience… and, when 2017 arrives and Mint 13 reaches it’s end of support, than I’ll see what linux will bring us.
So, do you have similar experiences? Are you still using old hardware from a realistic point of view (I mean, not just for the experience of it but on a day-per-day basis)?
Cheers B-)
screenshot and
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Linux Mint 13 on 2004 Toshiba Satellite A50 Success
