New adventures in Linux

[Iain]

Just thought I'd mention my latest escapades. There's been a unused machine lying around here for ages, it was free. PIII something, 128mb RAM. It was an ex corporate PC and they had put Ubuntu on it before they gave it away, tad marginal on the specs though. They also gave it away without giving the user name or the password, tried everything obvious, no go.

So I put Xubuntu (Ubuntu with XFCE) on it yesterday. Install took an absolute age, but it worked perfectly right away. I quite like the feel of XFCE, I might put it on the main machine. I'm tempted to try Fluxbuntu on it (Fluxbox), downloaded it and tried it on the ancient laptop, but I figured it wouldn't work and it didn't. It's a livecd that you can install, and that laptop seems to have a specific conflict issue with power management stuff in Ubuntu.

Anyway, I figured one or two people here might be interested, esp in Fluxbuntu. It's still a developmental release, but the livecd seemed to work fine on machines other than the laptop.

[Iain]

Ok, day off, too much time on my hands and a Philips screwdriver.

I've taken the laptop apart. This morning I put the fluxbuntu cd in the laptop, turned it on and left it. About an hour later it was in. The problem is the cd drive, it is on its last legs. It gave up during my attempted install from the livecd, it cannot transfer data fast enough any more, it spins up a little and down again constantly.

My bright idea is this -

1. Take laptop apart and remove hard drive.
2. Buy this (or something like it) - from ebay
3. Put hard drive in tower with no other hard drives connected and set bios to boot from cd
4. Install fluxbuntu on to laptop hard drive using the tower, get everything set up.
5. Put laptop hard drive back, will have no further use for large amounts of data transferred from cd

Is there a flaw in this plan?

[roo_ster]

Can you config your laptop BIOS to boot from a USB drive?

2GB thumbdrives are available down the street from me for < $25.  1GB thumbs from $16.

If you get the image on to the thumb, can you not boot & install from it?

[Iain]

I bought the laptop in '99, I think its a little too old to be able to do that.

[Thor]

Iain, my laptop is of similar age and if I press F2 right at(after)post, it will send to to a boot up prompt, allowing me to choose where I boot from. It's a Toshiba Satellite 1805. I forget the choices, but there are several.

[roo_ster]

Iain:

That may be true, but spending 5 minutes to check your BIOS boot options might clear the matter.  Even if the current BIOS won't allow it, if you know your mobo model & manuf, you may be able to get a more current BIOS that will. 

I have done what you describe in the past, (install while HD in another box, etc.) and I never got it to work when the hardware is different.  I might be do-able, but I have not been aboe to do it.

Good luck with your project.

[Iain]

I've since checked, there is definitely no option to boot from USB.

However there are clever little programs around to create floppy disks that you can boot from that then switch over to the USB. Puppy linux is one option for this.

Whatever happens, I'll try installing fluxbuntu on the hard drive using another computer and see what happens. Somebody I know managed to do something not dissimilar when he bought an old tablet pc with no optical drive and no option to boot from USB. He did it with XP though.

[JimMarch]

In case you don't realize this: laptop CD drives all have the same layout inside.  They are bolted into a subchassis which is specific to the brand.  Sometimes there is tape involved that ALSO connects subchassis to drive but that's just a razor or sharp knife job separating...

The only tricky part is that some have an external faceplate that's a pure rectangle, while some are "notched".  It's possible to swap the faceplates across to convert one from the other, but it's tricky.  Best to buy the right type.  With your drive open, it will be dead obvious which you've got.

Anyways.  A working used straight-CD-ROM laptop drive is pretty damn cheap - usually no more than $20.  That's your answer here.

[Iain]

My little adapter arrived yesterday, and I spent some time working on this project last night.

I went with Puppy linux, nice and small, abiword as default and there was an Opera loaded version to download. Ran it as a livecd on another machine, liked it. Got no experience with anything other than debian stuff, but I didn't like fluxbox much. Puppy is much more windows like, so I'll have to learn command line prompts for this if I want to get clever.

Flawless install on to the hard drive, straight into the laptop and no problems at all. Half an hours work got the right drivers working for my wireless card, and this is being typed from the old thing.

Jim - I may now bother to get a new cd drive, didn't really want to spend more than the three quid that the adapter cost in the first instance.

Only thing that doesn't work, doesn't seem to recognise USB sticks. I'll have to figure it out, but floppy works, so I can transfer documents.