Journal GeckoFood's Journal: [geek] Loading Linux on an older laptop 17
I recently replaced the family laptop and decided to load up CentOS on the old machine. Old is relative - it's about 5 years old. Anyway, having two Linux laptops in the house will allow me to play around with DHCP, DNS, NFS and some other services before I make the plunge into certification.
2.0GHz processor, 2GB RAM and an 80GB HDD.
The install took 3.5 hours for a vanilla install.
Pretty sure the hard drive is on the south end of its lifetime. Dropped in a replacement, and it's installing now. I expect it to take maybe 45-60 minutes (IDE HDD, not SATA). It's already moving a lot faster.
Bah, wimp.... (Score:1)
AMD Athlon 1200MHz (yes, a model without model ratings, so it's old!) with 512Meg RAM and 20Gig HD. Ubuntu update from 9.10 to 10.04.... I wouldn't have a clue: I just clicked "do update", let it run overnight, then clicked the few post-installation dialogs and let it run overnight again.
It's a machine my brother uses to go online when he's at his apartment. I need to clean up his real machine, but I haven't had the time yet.
Do note that this machine runs perfectly fine for surf-only tasks.
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The problem with this laptop was definitelty the hard drive. With the new one installed the OS install took about 45 minutes, for a complete load of everything on the CentOS DVD which equates to about 6 GB of stuff.
As a bonus, it runs quieter now, too.
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Yes, that makes sense... The laptop on which I'm typing this was doing weird stuff too. Luckily, Ubuntu contains something that warns you when the SMART status is going south. It warned me. Putting in another disk (funnily enough, I just recuperated a same-capacity, same-speed disk somewhere else) fixed everything.
What I don't get it that our favourite OS from Redmond doesn't incorporate SMART status checking by default. Perhaps Vista or 7 do now, but XP definitely doesn't.
Besides, I was just teasing wi
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I know - it was clear that you were giving me a lighthearted jab, and I took it as such. But, rather than respond to the tease I wanted to instead follow up and say that the hard drive was absolutely the problem.
I have a new set of problems, now, though - the video adapter needs an updated driver and I do not have wireless support out of the box so I need to add in the support for the wireless. I might as well update the kernel once I figure out
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This worked very well, and it was VERY easy to set up! Thanks for the point to the link.
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Ubuntu server (Score:2)
The server version of ubuntu is awesome; install only what you want, and everything else is an apt-get away. It doesn't even come with X by default.
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I considered Ubuntu for a short time but I selected CentOS because it is, for all intents and purposes, Red Hat in a pretty blue dress. Once I replaced the hard drive, I redid the install and it loaded everything in less than an hour.
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If Centos is RedHat in a blue dress, think of Ubuntu server as Linux in a string bikini :-D
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Yeah, like David Hasselhoff in a string bikini. :-{
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I will eventually go that route. For now the goal was to just get it off the ground. We use PXE here at work for a larger system and it's definitely a nice option. Before that, though, I am going to set up a full kickstart via the network and reinstall that way.
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Basically, Ubuntu Server will give you a bare-bones system. A bit like Debian after the installation. You'll have the command line and nothing running except the bare minimum.
At that point you decide what you want to have on that machine. Imagine you want to run GIMP, you type "sudo aptitude install gimp" and the GIMP will be installed with all the required packages to run it.
The advantage of Ubuntu Server over Debian Lenny is that it has a few proprietary drivers for NICs. If you know what you want,
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I would not recommend trying the GIMP example I gave... I have no idea what it depends on, which could be the whole Gnome desktop or only X. Who knows.... :-)