[GLLUG] Re: Preparing an Old Laptop
Charles Tower
c.e.tower at gmail.com
Fri Jan 26 21:28:34 EST 2007
Yeah, I was surprised Win2000Pro could fit on a 2GB disk, let alone MS
Office XP. Of course, never having used either, I am no expert on them.
Perhaps there's some kind of minimal installation that can be done.
Thanks to Matt and Clay for suggesting partimage. That's what I used,
with the flash drive, since I have no network to use. I had a heck of a
time getting any live CDs to boot the laptop, but I finally succeeded
with an old version of Knoppix I had. partimage also has a nice
interface that makes setting all the options easy. I also liked Adam's
suggestion of an adaptor to allow me to connect the laptop hard drive to
my desktop PC and just copying everything. I almost bought a 20GB drive
I found on CraigsList to just replace the old one, until I looked in the
user manual I downloaded that said it probably won't handle drives
larger than 8GB, and only drives a little over 6GB had been tested.
Now to getting Linux running on it. I'm going to try Puppy Linux first,
even though it's a bit of an odd duck. I've already had it running from
the live CD, and had a real GUI (JWM) running with about 28MB of RAM
leftover. The laptop only has 64MB of RAM total, so I was impressed. I
know I could upgrade the RAM and hard drive, and get a battery that
works, but I don't want to sink too much money into this until I see if
I can get it running satisfactorily. Plus, I think it would be cool to
have such an under-powered PC being made useful.
Chick
Matt Graham wrote:
> They fit 2K and MS Office on a 2G disk? Whoa.
>
> partimage will do this. It has an option to split its backup files into
> files of N meg in size, and to wait after each volume change. I think
> it'll allow you to umount a backup medium and sneakernet it somewhere.
> If it doesn't, time to hook up a PCMCIA NIC.
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