My current (hah!) laptop I got in August of 1997, but it was by no means state-of-the-art at that time. It’s an Acer/Texas Instruments Extensa-Scholar ESS2, model E610CD. Specs are Pentium 133 MHz CPU, 64MB RAM, 1.4GB HD, CD-ROM, but no floppy.
It’s got Win98 on it now, but I can’t get a wireless PC Card to install correctly since I don’t have a Win98 CD handy. (I just want to surf the net over in the living room, dammit!) I’d like to throw Linux on it and see if it can do better, but I’d rather not flail around for weeks trying.
I did find some good resources w/ Google for attempting this, but I was wondering if any Dopers have had any success with laptops that old, and if they could share their stories, ideas, tips, distros, and configs.
Before I hit submit, I realized I should search first. Now I’ve got 20 tabs of likely threads to read, but I may as well post anyway.
I’ve put linux on laptops that old. I had the most trouble with video drivers. YMMV.
I had success with Slackware (version 8 I think) and Red Hat version 6. Slackware was a royal pain in the backside, because it was mostly trial and error editing a text config file until I got the graphics to work. Red Hat just installed. Poof. Easy. Red Hat 7 wouldn’t install at all. Red Hat 6 worked fine. Again, YMMV.
Other problems I ran into:
On one Micron laptop, it had an option to either install a battery or a floppy drive in one bay. The floppy drive worked under Windows 95 but did not work reliably under Windows 2000 or Linux. After poking around on the net, I found a command that would disable the FIFO on the floppy, and from then on out it worked fine under Linux.
I also had a heck of a time with a PCMCIA combo card in the Micron. The card had ethernet, a modem, and something else (can’t remember what). I found instructions on the net about how to manually set the parameters for the card, but when I tried the instructions they didn’t work. When I dug through it all, I found that the instructions didn’t quite match the resources on my laptop where the card had been configured. Once I made everything match, the PCMCIA card worked fine.
I found google to be my most helpful friend during all of it. Googling the model of the laptop plus the model of the device being configured would yield a lot of advice. Most of it didn’t work, but eventually I found the right path to take.
With specs like that, you best bet will probably be Damn Small Linux, which they claim can run on a 486 with 16 MB of memory. Another option might be Puppy Linux, though you don’t have enough ram to boot it from a live cd (you’ll have to install it to your hard drive).
I don’t know how well wireless setup will go for you, I’ve only done it once, and that was in a different distribution and considerably more modern hardware. A quick google yielded this thread on another board, which may or may not be helpful.
You might check craigslist or freecycle and see if you can’t find some more RAM for that puppy cheap. Or you could ask if anyone here has some that they don’t mind selling you. The problem I ran into with the distros like DSL and PL is that they don’t always want to install on the hard drive. When I was trying to sort out a problem with one of my PCs, I was running one of those distros (I forget which one it was) and when I decided to install it to a hard drive, it involved a lot of hoop jumping with the distro asking me (literally), “Are you sure you want to do this? There’s really no reason to do this.” and I finally gave up. If I’d have had the time, I would have poked around on some of the forums devoted to those distros to see what they have to offer in terms of advice.
A couple years ago, I attempted to put various Linux distros on my wife’s old laptop, a Samsung something or other. She had upgraded to an iBook; since she didn’t need the Samsung, I didn’t spend all that much time on trying to get it to a satisfactory state.
No distro I tried worked “out of the box”. Among them were: RedHat, Debian, Ubuntu, Damn Small Linux, Vector Linux, SLAX, and one or two others that were “fringe” distros (I remember looking at Puppy Linux at the time, but it was still early in their development and the laptop didn’t have enough RAM). One that came close was SLAX – the issue was the video (half garbled display, such that interlaced lines were offshifted).
IIRC, the only one that I actually got to a semi-usable state was Debian, but that was only when I used XFCE4 (rather than the default Gnome). I say “semi-usable” because although it ran, it was so damn slow as to be crippling. Command line was fine, however. Useless for my wife, but fine.
Again, I have to reiterate that I didn’t give it the time required; I don’t doubt that I could have gotten something decent going. I got a good feeling from reading both the DSL and Vector Linux websites, as it seemed to me that they were responding to bug reports and really putting in the time to get things going. As it turns out, she used it to build a remote sensing instrument (don’t recall the details, however) – a piece of hardware communicated on the serial port, and the supplied software was Windows only. So, she was forced to put Win98 back on it and I never pursued it any further.
