[wplug] Old Laptop

[Jonathan Billings]

On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 08:49:14AM -0500, Weber, Lawrence A wrote:
> I have an old IBM E600 Pentium II laptop currently running a buggy
> Win2k.  It is connected to a wireless network via a PCMCIA card
> (D-Link).  RAM:128, HD:20G.
>  
> I would like to replace the OS with Linux and use it for a simple serial
> terminal and occasional wireless web browsing and email. I have tried
> XUBUNTU, Slackware and a couple other LiveCD's to see what distro might
> work but have not been able to get any to boot.  They start but never
> finish.  I recently tried what I thought was a FreeBSD LiveCD but it
> also refuses to get very far into the boot.

You didn't give a very good description of what the error was.  Have
you tried doing a network install?  Install from disk?  

I have a Dell Inspiron 4000 with around the same specs, that I have
install ubuntu on.  I used the CD install, and didn't have any
problems.  

> Should I be looking at an older version of Linux?  Should I expect
> problems with the PCMCIA wireless card?

You should probably use the latest version of a linux distro that has
been slimmed down.  Versions that are old enough to be small by
default will not have security updates.  Xubuntu is a good start, it
should be able to work with 128M of ram, particularly if you use the
text-based frontend.

Currently, I'm actually running a fedora 10 beta with the "Sugar"
desktop, which is what the OLPC laptops use.


-- 
Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>