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xbear · Posted: Fri Dec 07, 2007 3:46 pm Post subject: Aoother old laptop :-)

Hi from Vegas !

I am starting a new project: Get Linux on a Gateway Solo 2500 given to me by a family member. This is a great old box, built like a tank and with a smaller footprint than usual which is my current preference.

CPU 333 meg
RAM 64 meg
Soundcard (can use creative emulation) and Wireless (Lincsys) not an issue, I can probably figure this out

The issue: This is a non El-Torito complient device and will not boot from CD, so any distro I use might require Isolinux and kernel 2.4.xx in order to boot because of the old system bios. Boot disk and grub has been sussed for other OS's, so the issue is Xandros, which is my preferance. Has anyone success here.?

Distros being considered:

1) Xandros ( because my extremely computer literate wife will learn this one fast)
--- does XN work on the older distros? Maybe OCE 1,x or 2,x ?
---Does anyone know where to find the older distros? I have 4.x and 3.x, but these are probably too big and not able to be run on this old jewel.
--- Eventiually, I would like to remove everything that is not necessary for this machine and create a custom ISO

2) Damn Small Linux
3) Puppy Linux
4) Vectorlinux
5) Debian

Any thoughts, ideas, lorum links?

Thanks, Glen
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bryantrv · Posted: Fri Dec 07, 2007 4:21 pm Post subject:

I've got Xandros OCE2.01 at http://bryantrv.com/misc/ , but I've never tried it (I just found it one day and figured I would archive it).
I would bet that either Puppy, DSL or good old Debian would be best- but you might give X2 a whirl- I'm not sure of the "hardware era" when it was released Wink

.
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xbear · Posted: Sat Dec 08, 2007 4:01 am Post subject:

bryantrv · Posted: Sat Dec 08, 2007 8:07 am Post subject:

Sorry- I got an apostrophe in there where it didn't belong- try it again ( or
http://bryantrv.com/misc/

)
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Chris Bryant
http://www.kindofpeckish.com
http://opensourcemachine.org
http://bryantrv.com
http://rx4rv.com

XandrosAdminAJ · Posted: Sat Dec 08, 2007 12:10 pm Post subject: Re: Aoother old laptop :-)

xbear · Posted: Sun Dec 09, 2007 8:33 pm Post subject: Re: Aoother old laptop :-)

still looking for 2 and 3 OCE
I did a DL on both of Bryan's versions, they wouldn't open in ubuntu studio.
Couldn't get them to open on Win32 using 7zip either. Perhaps I got a corrupted DL on bot of them. I am reattempting now. Didn't work the 2nd time either, it's off to try others venues for Xandros.

...........Glen
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--- started with UNIX (before that Redmond OS ) and now have gone full circle back to Linux

xbear · Posted: Mon Dec 10, 2007 7:14 pm Post subject:

I just found a torrent for 3.02 OCE, getting it now.
If this doesn't work, it might mean a RAM upgrade might be needed
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--- started with UNIX (before that Redmond OS ) and now have gone full circle back to Linux

bryantrv · Posted: Mon Dec 10, 2007 8:12 pm Post subject:

Yeah- I'm afraid they became corrupt- and the only other copies I had were bad as well.
To keep people from wasting time I just deleted all of the Xandros stuff from my server- including X4 OCE, as the copy I had was old, and if Xandros can't be bothered to supply a torrent at least...
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Chris Bryant
http://www.kindofpeckish.com
http://opensourcemachine.org
http://bryantrv.com
http://rx4rv.com

xbear · Posted: Sat Feb 02, 2008 1:23 am Post subject: Update: total success

It has been a long and interesting journey;
I tried a lot of different distros to no avail. The only one that would actually install to this old floppy emulation machine was Damn Small Linux. I didn't like it at all, the UI was terrible and unpolished. Tools were difficult to use and I knew that it was really more fun and games in this case than a workable solution.
I found Puppy Linux, got it to boot with a floppy and was impressed with the fact that it was very perky on this old machine. Also there seemed to be a lot of available aps. It would not install or boot from ext 3 because of the old style bios. I had to install linux to a fat partition (yes, you read that right) to get it to boot on this old machine as the boot floppy searches fat only for Puppy and then uses loadln to start Linux. So I was forced to boot from floppy while I sorted things out.
I had a win me installed so my wife would be able to have windows while she came up to speed. I could not get millenium to drop to Dos or start DOS, so couldn't set up a pre-boot manager. I decided to drop down to Win 98 as I would be able to use batch files to control the boot OS selection. This worked fine, but win 98 has bad usb support and would not install my wifi card either, it kept installing the drivers twice...
After all that nonsense, I discovered GAG which is a great little boot manager, provided you are not using a SATA drive. Then decided I could reinstall Win me for the wife, but <groan> lost the serial number.
The upside is that my wife is extremely computer literate and will pick it up quickly. Puppy is fast and very responsive on this old 336 mhz P2 / 180 (max allowed by bios) MB RAM machine. More importantly, WIFI is solid, I have everything working on this machine, INCLUDING onboard sound. The speakers ar cheesy, but fine for audiobooks. The ancient laptop still has a lot of life in it.

...as does this old bear
...Glen
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--- started with UNIX (before that Redmond OS ) and now have gone full circle back to Linux

gnuuser · Posted: Tue Sep 29, 2009 4:48 pm Post subject: nother old machine

I have an old omnibook 4150 running puppy linux great distro for an old machine and it has a lot of great software to boot
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John Pendleton · Xplorer Joined: 17 Sep 2005 Posts: 47