raymac46 Posted December 14, 2017 Share Posted December 14, 2017 (edited) I have a post in the Windows forum about my wife's friend Shari who borked her Win 10 installation on her Dell laptop - and how I rescued her. Shari had an old Gateway MX2067 laptop besides her Dell so I thought it might be a good idea to see if I could fix it up as a backup for email at least. It turned out to be a real crashbox: Celeron M 1.4 GHz, 60 GB HDD, 512 MB DDR 2700 RAM. The absolute Max RAM would be 1 GB but I didn't have any junk SODIMMS and I didn't think it was worth it to spend $30 or so on a 1GB kit. The machine ran Windows XP back in the day. Of course it's a 32 bit model. I decided that Lubuntu would be a good choice to at least try with this memory challenged junker. The machine wouldn't boot from a USB but it did have a DVD-ROM. I burned an ISO and booted it. No wifi but hey..it's Broadcom. I plugged in an Ethernet cable and started the install. It took FOREVER but finally I got it configured and running off the hard disk. Lubuntu's driver manager had no Broadcom drivers but after more research I installed firmware-b43-installer and this did the trick. The wifi is working. I'll set up Chromium so Shari can go in and get her email. No YouTube though - not with this old beast. I am quite pleased with how well it runs. At least as well as it did with XP. And it's a lot more secure. Edited December 14, 2017 by raymac46 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted December 14, 2017 Share Posted December 14, 2017 Cool Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dr. J Posted December 14, 2017 Share Posted December 14, 2017 Nice! I must admit I get a bit of kick out of hearing about hardware like that being saved from the scrap heap. In my early Linux days I was messing around with an old desktop with 256MB of ram and an AMD K series... I actually remember typing up an assignment for university on it using Nano and LaTeX. (The module was "Introduction to Computing" ). The machine is still here in the attic with an old Slackware or possibly Knoppix install on it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted December 14, 2017 Author Share Posted December 14, 2017 Well I'm sure this 2005 era laptop would do fine with a text based Linux but its owner is strictly a GUI user. It's a bit old for my tastes now as I have about a 10 year window. My oldest machine now is from January 2008 - an AMD Athlon 64 X2 with 6 GB RAM and an Nvidia GTX 650 Ti Boost GPU. It's actually quite an impressive old desktop that runs Linux Mint Cinnamon very well. I had Linux running on machines that would be 20 years old now but they couldn't do much with modern browser technology. My oldest Linux laptop today is a broken down 2012 AMD Trinity A6 model that my daughter drop kicked off the bed a couple of times. Runs OK but you can't close the lid easily. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abarbarian Posted January 22, 2018 Share Posted January 22, 2018 Talking of 2008 pc's. I built this one then and am running MX-17 from a 8 GB slow usb-2 stick on it. root@mx1:/home/demo# inxi -Fm System: Host: mx1 Kernel: 4.13.0-1-amd64 x86_64 bits: 64 Desktop: Xfce 4.12.3 Distro: MX-17_x64 Horizon December 15, 2017 Machine: Device: desktop Mobo: ASUSTeK model: M2N32-SLI DELUXE v: 1.XX serial: 123456789000 BIOS: Phoenix v: ASUS M2N32-SLI DELUXE 5002 date: 03/18/2010 CPU: Dual core AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ (-MCP-) cache: 1024 KB clock speeds: max: 2900 MHz 1: 1000 MHz 2: 1000 MHz Memory: Array-1 capacity: 16 GB devices: 4 EC: None Device-1: DIMM_A1 size: 1 GB speed: 800 MHz type: Other Device-2: DIMM_B1 size: 1 GB speed: 800 MHz type: Other Device-3: DIMM_A2 size: 1 GB speed: 800 MHz type: Other Device-4: DIMM_B2 size: 1 GB speed: 800 MHz type: Other Graphics: Card: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] RV770 [Radeon HD 4850] Display Server: x11 (X.Org 1.19.2 ) drivers: ati,radeon (unloaded: modesetting,fbdev,vesa) Resolution: 1280x1024@60.02hz OpenGL: renderer: Gallium 0.4 on AMD RV770 (DRM 2.50.0 / 4.13.0-1-amd64, LLVM 3.9.1) version: 3.3 Mesa 13.0.6 Drives: HDD Total Size: 188.1GB (1.5% used) ID-1: USB /dev/sda model: DT_101_G2 size: 8.0GB ID-2: /dev/sdb model: ST3120026A size: 120.0GB ID-3: /dev/sdc model: KINGSTON_SV300S3 size: 60.0GB Partition: ID-1: / size: 3.1G used: 228M (8%) fs: overlay dev: N/A Sensors: System Temperatures: cpu: 59.0C mobo: 37.0C gpu: 55.5 Fan Speeds (in rpm): cpu: 3688 psu: 0 sys-1: 942 sys-2: 0 sys-3: 976 sys-4: 1070 Info: Processes: 178 Uptime: 8 min Memory: 773.8/3954.5MB Client: Shell (bash) inxi: 2.3.53 demo@mx1:~ $ sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/sda /dev/sda: Timing cached reads: 2436 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1218.75 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 44 MB in 3.04 seconds = 14.45 MB/sec In use it is very good for light duties running of the usb stick and if I did a install performance would be more than acceptable. I think I need to redo the thermal paste on the cpu though as it is running a tad hot.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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