Tagged and Bagged: Linux
I am playing around with an old Acer AcerNote Lite. Its not got a lot going for it by today’s standards. It is a cute little laptop, and was likely quite a nice little item when new. It would have come originally with Windows 95 on it and I am certainly not going to even try to reinstall that (I’d have to have the floppies). The specs are:
- 120mhz Pentium processor
- 8MB system RAM and 32MB RAM module
- 1GB HD
- Chips & Technologies video
- Floppy
- no CD Rom
This should be interesting. So far, I’ve gotten the Debian Etch floppies to start an install. We’ll see how it goes. I’ve got to get a 16 bit ethernet PCMCIA card to proceed any further, as I’ll need to get the rest of the system off the internet. Perhaps I’ll try for DSL and see if I can do the floppy netinstall hack mentioned in the forums. Wish me luck!
Heh, turn it into a server and see if it can withstand Digg.
Can’t remember what type of computer it was (seems like it was an old mac or a P2), but a while back someone posted a link on there to a 10+ year old computer running a http server (a static site) and it managed to stay up with few problems. Says a lot about how many resources are wasted on modern dynamic web page serving.
Why is it that with all the modern hardware we still have web browsers that struggle like molasses? Think of all those java web applets in distributed environments that don’t do anything efficient? Or the massive software bloat and inefficient architectures that render modern powerful computers into overdecorated slugs. This says something profound about our human nature…the machines are just what they are.
I salute your dedication to not overlooking machines that may be old but are still powerful when given a sane environment to run in! Turn that little computer into the best router/web server in the world!
* This post was written in Konqueror 3.5.7 *
Oh yeah, it doesn’t have any USB either.
So, it’ll be interesting. I’d probably use this little lappy to surf the net while the kids are playing games on the desktops. My day to day needs are pretty slim. I’m going to try to get a light Linux on there with a graphical environment - perhaps Fluxbox or IceWM (or, maybe Windowmaker). I can surf with Opera or Konqueror.
Those specs sound very similar to our 1st Compaq Presuckio, only we had a cdrom.I finally sent it to the landfill a couple of years ago.
Oh the days of Windows 95 and floppy drives. My first pc had Windows 95, and I loved it!
Anyway, good luck with getting it up and running. (:
I was toying with the idea of installing from the old Tecra and popping the drive into the Acer, as the Tecra has a CD Rom.
OMG, 8Mb ram! ROTFL! That’s a museum piece!
I once back in the day had a Toshiba Protege I think it was, 80MHz, 4MB of RAM, 500MB HDD. I had Slackware 3.5 loaded on it. I didn’t install X at all but used it to connect to the internet, check email and browse the web with lynx, all text mode. Was super fast back in the day to do what I needed.
Well, Richard, its a total of 40MB, to be fair. But, yes, its getting on for sure. The Tecra isn’t much newer and its running Windows ‘98SE on it. I might just end up turfing them, but I thought I’d give it a hero’s try at first before letting it fill the landfill.
Interesting project. I think that older hardware tend to be sturdier than modern day computers anyway. That’s why they last so long. These days, with all the ‘made in China/Taiwan’ components, they just don’t last as long.
I hope you can put it to good use while it lasts!
I actually understood some of this :P~~~
Good luck with it, Corey. If nothing else, it’ll give you hours of fun, sorta like a kid playing with a…damn, my mind just went blank…you know, those metal pieces that you put together to build bridges. Oh wait, I think it just got off the tip of my tongue…an erector set? (My mind of today could be compared to that laptop of yesteryear…lol)
How’s the computer revival going? Did you manage to get it up and running?
Hari, I don’t think it’s just because it’s made in China/Taiwan though, I think it’s a design “feature”. By making them burn out sooner, they force us to upgrade more and more, and sooner.
I haven’t yet. I did pop the hard drive from the Tecra into it to see if it would boot Windows 98 and it did get to a desktop, so that was a bit encouraging. I’m trying to get an old PCMCIA NIC card from an acquaintance, which I may have as early as tomorrow. With that, I should be able to a net install of Debian or FreeBSD from a floppy disk.
Any updates? Seems like an interesting project. Hey, that thing is faster than my first computer (P133!)
I’m actually thinking about doing something similar. I’ve always wanted a laptop for school use, but can’t afford one. I’m thinking about buying an older one (not quite that old!) and loading some Linux on there, just to run office type apps.
Thanks for taking the time to comment, Brandon. Unfortunately, the fellow that I was going to get the old NIC from had a houseful of sickness last weekend, so we’re going to try and do this for next weekend. I still think that doing a net install will be easier than trying to find a serial connect cable and installing through it. This will give me the time to try doing the net install floppy that I saw on the Damn Small Linux forum. DSL has a killer set of apps for such a small size. Can you imaging 100 times the apps of a standard Windows 95 install and 1/3 the size on the hard drive?
Try and find a laptop that has at least a P-2 350mhz in it, so that you can run anything that you’re looking for without too much slowness. A P-3 would be much better, of course.
I got the NIC! Yay!
The driver module is not in the stock Debian kernel! Boo!
I will perservere…