DSL is great!

Forum: User Feedback
Topic: DSL is great!
started by: kerry

Posted by kerry on April 23 2006,19:45

I have this old hp omnibook xe2 400mhz 256ram laptop. My mom uses this for surfing the web and checking her mail. Last week the hard drive died so my dad was getting ready to throw it out, so once again linux to the rescue. Prior to this it had been running mepis, which was the first time linux saved this laptop(1 year ago when win 98 died). I quickly grabbed it and told him that there might still be a little life left. I was planning to run it by livecd but come to find it has also started to go,sometimes it works and sometimes it won't read the disks. So i grabbed my many copies of DSL and started to see if this beast would read any of the disks, i finally found one copy that the disk reads everytime(version2.1rc2) after that it has been a little bit of trial and error to see how far i can push this sucker. So after i played with it a while i realized that the 256 of ram is not enough for the stuff i wanted to load to get a fairly good working web surfer for mom, she had gotten so use to all the things she could do with mepis, so that was my goal to give her back what she was use to. I took a chance and formatted a old 512 usb key as swap to hopefully get enough room to load all her favorite stuff and it works. I have put the latest firefox 1.5.0.2 with flash and mplayer support for the vids her friends send her and sites she visits, then i put gaim so she can "IM" with everyone. Finally i had to install rox so she could find the stuff she downloads(she just couldn't figure out emelfm). Of course not everything is perfect, i can't manage to get enough room for her favorite office app openoffice(abiword will not read the various docs her work sends her). Anyways it has been running a week now with no problems and hopefully when i get another usb key there will be enough room to put openoffice with out it locking up.

So there it is my adventure and how DSL saved another computer from the recyclers. Thank you all for this great work.

Posted by AwPhuch on April 24 2006,06:35

good God you would throw out a laptop like that!!!

WAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!

Laptop HD's arent that expensive!

Glad you got it running with USB though! Thats awesome!

Welcome to the Revolution!!!

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by kerry on April 24 2006,13:14

That's my dad's way of dealing with it, if he can't fix it than it's not worth keeping.lol. I did check laptop hd prices and i think they cost more than the laptop is worth, but at this point i think we've streched this old laptop as far as it can go, the cdroms going too and even the floppy barely works. I think theres something wrong with the bios but hp does not have a updated bios because the laptop is to old. I'm just going to push this sucker till it goes totaly dead.lol

Posted by humpty on April 25 2006,13:56

throw away the hd & cdrom ? this means you can disable any
fan inside and have a ~silent~ machine.
way cool. :cool:

also, there are CF/IDE convertors (cheap). this way it might be easier to upgrade to new dsl versions.

Posted by green on April 25 2006,14:01

I had one of those adapters for an old laptop. Very handy. $20.

< http://damnsmalllinux.org/store/embedded_storage >

Posted by AwPhuch on April 26 2006,00:07

And DSL on a 512MB CFdisk would use a ton less power than a huge power hungry Harddrive

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by humpty on April 26 2006,04:51

Pricing of those adapters vary greatly, $1 ?? the shipping
costs 4 times the item!!
check this out;
< http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Compact....iewItem >

Posted by lovdsl on April 26 2006,11:30

I use to have an old compaq laptop that the floppy seemed to be going in....frequent errors...turned out the internal battery was going and strangely caused these errors.