[BozemanLUG] Older PC hardware and older distros . .

[Scott Dowdle]

David,

----- Original Message -----
> You inspired me.  I pulled out a 700mhz celeron laptop with 192Mb ram
> and a 10G hard drive.  I installed Fedora 14 on it.  It works fine.  I'm
> using XFCE4 and the desktop environment.  I can even play flv movies with
> no trouble with mplayer.  This should be perfect for entertaining the
> kids on those 10 hour drives to Nebraska to visit the inlaws.

Wow, an older laptop with a 10 hour battery life... amazing! :)  Ok, I'm guessing you have a cigarette lighter to AC adapter box of some kind... or a vehicle that has that built in?

> Note that the installer won't work.  I installed it in a VM on a larger
> box and then tar'ed it up.  I created an ext3 partition and untar the
> files there.  I installed grub and tweaked it until the kernel loaded.

That sounds like an interesting install strategy.  I'd love to hear more.  How did you get the files over there?  Take the hard drive out and connect it to another system?  Or did you boot off of some LiveCD like the rescue/netinstall CD?

> I did something similar to create a bootable thumb drive.  The nice thing
> about this thumb drive as oppose to the ones other people make is that
> there is not compressed static image with a writeable overlay.  It's much
> faster.

Is that laptop capable of booting from USB?

> If anybody wants one of my bootable thumb images, I'll be at the next
> meeting and we can copy it.

How did you create it?

TYL,
-- 
Scott Dowdle
704 Church Street
Belgrade, MT 59714
(406)388-0827 [home]
(406)994-3931 [work]