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Another Old Junker


raymac46

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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 by raymac46
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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.

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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.

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  • 1 month later...

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..

 

:breakfast:

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