Linux on Old Laptop

Shop deals on ebay
sauter shop
UKworkshop.co.uk

Help Support UKworkshop.co.uk:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
chipchaser

chipchaser

Established Member
Joined
31 Aug 2007
Messages
300
Reaction score
0
Location
South Warwickshire Village
I was given an old Dell Latitude Cpi, unwanted by its previous owner.
It is a Pentium II 266 with 96MB of memory and a 3.8GB HDD, and the battery is dead! It has all the usual connectors plus one USB port. It came with WinXP installed which made it unbelievably slow so I deleted that and installed Win98 and it now runs nicely.

Any suggestions for a small but up to date Linux distro that would work on this machine? I would use this initially just for web browsing and emails maybe a bit of word processing but nothing demanding or specialist. My aim is to try out Linux to see how I get on with it. I would wipe Win98 and install Linux on a clean HDD.

I want something that installs itself with minimal input from me, recognises the hardware, has GUI not command line but perhaps a smaller desktop than KDE or Gnome would be sensible? Maybe XFCE? I would want to connect to my wireless router with either the Netgear or Edimax wireless USB adaptors that I already have.

I have seen recommendations for CrunchBang, PCLinux, Puppy, Vector and Zenwalk but wouldn’t know how to choose and there are probably others?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Graham
 
chipchaser":3al4tv6e said:
I was given an old Dell Latitude Cpi, unwanted by its previous owner.
It is a Pentium II 266 with 96MB of memory and a 3.8GB HDD, and the battery is dead! It has all the usual connectors plus one USB port. It came with WinXP installed which made it unbelievably slow so I deleted that and installed Win98 and it now runs nicely.

Any suggestions for a small but up to date Linux distro that would work on this machine? I would use this initially just for web browsing and emails maybe a bit of word processing but nothing demanding or specialist. My aim is to try out Linux to see how I get on with it. I would wipe Win98 and install Linux on a clean HDD.

I want something that installs itself with minimal input from me, recognises the hardware, has GUI not command line but perhaps a smaller desktop than KDE or Gnome would be sensible? Maybe XFCE? I would want to connect to my wireless router with either the Netgear or Edimax wireless USB adaptors that I already have.

I have seen recommendations for CrunchBang, PCLinux, Puppy, Vector and Zenwalk but wouldn’t know how to choose and there are probably others?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Graham
Click to expand...

Linux will run, but I can't imagine a web browser that handles javascript, flash, and movies (or as we say in 2010 "a browser") living within that much RAM.

BugBear
 
I'd be inclined to agree with BB. You are not going to do much other than text based browsing. It will happily do word processing and email if you pick the right applications.
 
I've am looking into re-mastering Knoppix at the moment. Principally because on loading it searches out and connects to the local area network automatically, This LAN is my connection to the router. DSL is a derivative of Knoppix and does the same. On a sub 1GHz Pentium 11 with 256 Mb ram using a 'Live CD', DSL booted from power on to operational desktop in 1m 20 seconds. Now that is quick. I would be using the DSL for re-mastering but the software packages are a little sparse.

Interestingly I use a Linux Live CD for all my online financial dealings. Why? Because no-one can write any malware to the CD from anywhere. Therefore no machine based trackers, key loggers or other nasties.

A similar reason for the Knoppix re-mastering. A friend has children who continually download anything that takes their fancy, Viruses, Trojans, the lot. With a Live CD she can boot up to an operating system which is pristine every time.

HTH xy

p.s. While not the most recent browsing experiences the above systems will both allow you to visit this forum, where else is there to go? :)
 
I've got one of those exact laptops somewhere in the loft.
I can't actually remember which distro I ran on it - possibly some redhat or other.
The video card in those isn't fantastic - try using icewm as your windows manager. It will run opera quite happily - not sure about firefox.
 
chipchaser, hows it running 98 with a dead battery?
surely the cost of a new battery is worth more than the laptop?
 
I've tried Puppy on a similarly specced laptop and it was hopeless.
It might be fine for a text based version, but as BB says graphics are pretty hopeless.

You can run a laptop just on the power supply and without battery - you just can't take it very far...
 
Grafter, thanks for your useful link to article on distros for older hardware. I also had a look at the reviews linked to from Distrowatch which suggests that several of these smaller distros have been improved significantly very recently. Jarviser, another UKW member who is also interested in Linux on laptops states that “out of the box compatibility has improved in the last two years”.

Bugbear and Tom, I hadn’t thought of the limit on the browser function of small ram. I found a Dell manual on the web and can definitely upgrade to 128MB (about £10 for a 64MB SODIMM from Ebay) but that’s not much improvement. Its possible this machine may take 256MB because it has a late BIOS but that means replacing both SODIMMs at £43 each, not worthwhile! Perhaps I should just plug it in to my router as is with Win98 and IE5 to see how it does. I can’t remember what browsing was like when these machines were new (about 1997-1999) although at home I would have been using a slightly better spec desktop pc but with dial up because broadband wasn’t available in our village then. I do recall waiting forever for pages to download and definitely no moving pictures!

XY, I used a Knoppix live CD last year to get into my desktop after the MBR was damaged by a Trojan, very useful. I was drawn to the lightweight Linux Os’s because I read that I could choose which packages to install to minimise the space used on the HDD. If I ran a live CD version would that use up more of the system memory?

JL, prompted by your post I found a test of browser memory use over time including Opera and Firefox. Firefox 3.0 reportedly used least memory with, IIRC, Opera 9.5 and IE8 next and last Safari using by far the most. I read that Seamonkey is a smaller programme (hardware requirements P233 and 128MB ram). Might it also be economical on memory? I haven’t found many mentions of it in my web trawling and wonder whether its development is lagging behind Firefox?

Andy, the cheapest replacement battery I found on Ebay, from Hong Kong, is £22.50, twice that much for a battery from UK. I am only planning to use this at home so would run from the mains as Pete says. It would be handy to play with whilst keeping my better half company while she watches TV. I don’t want to mess with my work PC at the moment.

Pete, was that a recent version of Puppy? I tried Puppy a year or eighteen months ago but it wouldn’t complete the installation. I downloaded again and burnt a new CD but it still got so far then gave up. Maybe I might have helped the installation along but I don’t know enough about Linux hence my search for something that installs easily.

Thanks for all the feedback, UKW members can be relied on to know stuff about almost anything. Apologies for length of this post.

Graham
 
chipchaser Hi,

Well you have a few interesting distros to try out. I cannot categorically answer your question I am afraid. One of the reasons that DSL is so quick is that, as I understand the situation, the whole of the distribution is loaded to RAM before use. In the case of others software is only loaded to RAM as required. Having read that again I suppose the answer to your question is YES, but please don't shoot me if I'm wrong.

Now here my knowledge is getting stretched. I have never really understood the Linux file system, but I am learning, I think. As I have been mucking Knoppix about, I found a suggestion to specify a 'Swapfile', on a local hard drive, when running with low memory. This swapfile is merely for the operating system to effectively extend the RAM, windows does something similar. With a Live CD this has to be re-done every time the system is booted, with a hard drive installation this presumably only needs to happen once. I believe the installation process takes care of this.

Many Live CD distributions are available free of course and this can be a many edged sword. Too much choice. Each one taking time to evaluate. For myself I lean towards versions based on Debian, rather than Red Hat, I think the package management runs more smoothly. I also find it useful to do a quick evaluation using a Virtual machine set up on my main machine, it's faster and doesn't require a CD to be burnt.

I am trying to help but I think perhaps only confuse matters more.

xy
 
Having read this thread yesterday got me thinking and last night I experimented with an old HP OneNote laptop - 256Mb RAM and an old Netgear wireless network card. As with many old notebooks the battery is knackered. So far just tried running it from the Ubuntu live cd and it loaded OK -but... as I've found in the past when experimenting on other computers, getting wireless networking is a pain. Wired networking has never been a problem (and not available on this old machine), but experimenting with ndiswrapper never got anywhere. So I was surprised to find that after only a bit of fiddling with terminal and entering a couple of command line instructions the wireless network actually worked. The problems of getting wireless networking working in the past has always put me off.

The thing about linux is that it is not simply point and click like windows but always seems to involve entering command line instructions.

Mind you I will now install Ubuntu on the old machine and see how it goes.

Misterfish
 
Looking into this further I attempted using Knoppix 6.2, latest version, Live CD on a machine with only 128 Mb RAM. It was, as has been guessed, very, very slow.

misterfish,
On the Laptop note I tried the same CD on the, fairly recent, laptop; it took me a while to realize that I had to put in the local area password. :) After that no problems.

xy
 
xy mosian":13zg5ic2 said:
misterfish,
On the Laptop note I tried the same CD on the, fairly recent, laptop; it took me a while to realize that I had to put in the local area password. :) After that no problems.

xy
Click to expand...

It didn't get that far. I tried setting up the basic info like the SSID using the utility but no joy with that. I ended up first using lspci and this then told me the device was wlan0. then I had to sudo iwconfig to tell the sysem the SSID, then when I went back into the graphic user interface utility and clicked save the network connected.

Misterfish
 
Crikey!

Of course Linux is free, and 'there's lots of help available'. That's true but the majority of forum are no where near as helpful with newbies as this one.

I have found that it requires a great deal of dredging to find the right snippet to get me out of a hole. Mostly because it is not always clear just which distribution, and version, is being discussed. Or should that just be Cussed?

xy
 
found this online that will be perfect for your old laptop

http://www.planetwatt.com/

its based on unbuntu so loads of forums etc etc
unbuntu software will work on it

hoping they bring out the promised power pc version shortly for my old powerbook g4!
 
Thanks for all the posts, I don’t regard any of the posts here as confusing. They all help either directly or by pointing out subjects to research. I have been reading about ram and swap files thanks to comments here and following up posts related to Old Laptops. With such a range of software available it is hard work just finding the information you need. I found this site: www.dedoimedo.com helpful to me as he doesn’t pitch straight into technical stuff but writes his reviews in plain language.

Grafter, thanks for pointing out WattOS. Their pitch concentrates on low energy use but doesn’t mention system requirements. My 96MB is too small for most distros. I was very taken with the reviews of Wolvix Cub, a small live linux which might work ok for me is as it runs with 200MHz and 96MB but read later that wireless is difficult to set up. I am trying the latest version of Puppy and have that running ok but haven’t yet connected to my router because although I have identified the device the instructions are very sparse/poorly written. I have found a guide on the net which I will try later. The wireless connection is essential as the laptop I am using has no ethernet socket, I think it was provided in the docking thing that I don’t have.


Without intending to knock Linux, it is worth saying that Win98 runs well, installed my Netgear wireless adaptor with no hassle and I can browse the web using IE5. Firefox, which I prefer says my hardware is too old to run their browser :)

Thanks for all the comments.

Graham
 

Latest posts

Back
Top