Installing linux on an ancient laptop
Good afternoon friends.
Today I will talk about how I could put Linux from scratch on my ancient laptop. And this story would not be so interesting if there were no CD-ROM, floppy drive, or USB boot on this laptop.
Prehistory
')
So, in some immemorial times, I became the owner of the Toshiba Portege 7020 laptop (by the way, it is on it that I now type this text). Brief specifications: onboard Pentium II, 192 MB of RAM and a hard disk of 15 GB. Designed as a sticker on the case, for Windows 98, 2000. In principle, a good way to go on a camping trip. The undoubted advantage is the low weight, since the laptop, in fact, consists of the laptop itself and the docking station. Those. the road is enough to take the laptop itself, without a docking station.
At the time of purchase, I even managed to install Windows XP on him, and he pulled it pretty well. But I decided not to buy the docking station (due to inexperience), which played a fatal role, since all the drives were located on it.
My tears, my sadness
Since the laptop was marching, it is not difficult to guess that viruses soon picked up on it. Of course, there was some kind of antivirus, but it was completely unpretentious, since the percent of it was already barely pulling. If you add here a monstrous XP, heavy programs like Word and other “joys”, then soon the work on the laptop turned into sheer torment. Brakes, constant buzz of the cooler and strong body heat. Also viruses.
Having decided that I had enough, I pulled out a hard one, formatted it, bought an external box for it and turned it into a large USB flash drive. The laptop itself, alas, ah, moved for a long time to the mezzanine.
Attempts to install the system
I realized all the importance of the docking station when I tried again to put the system on the laptop. It was not there. Of all the methods of “communication” with the outside world, the laptop has only one USB connector and an infrared port. Sparely, frankly. Naturally, the BIOS does not support booting from USB.
The first attempt was a frontal one: we connect the hard drive to the main computer, put the system on it, and then rearrange it back to the laptop and try to boot there. All versions of Windows have refused to boot. There was even an attempt to rearrange the hard one in the first reboot, between copying the system files and installing the drivers and everything else. Fakir was drunk, the trick also failed.
Months went by ...
Gradually my outlook expanded, and I became acquainted with unix-like systems. My first “sexual” (in terms of active configuration :-)) partner was FreeBSD. It is known that it is initially installed with the support of a full set of equipment, i.e. all that is in the world is a piece of iron. Well, I thought, since it is installed in this way, there is a chance to deceive the system: install it on the main computer, and then switch it hard to a laptop.
For the purity of the experiments, the installation of the system was carried out in a virtual machine. In short, it is possible to use any hard disk completely under the virtual operating system. That is, all those files that appear during a normal installation are created on the disk.
Having done all the tricks, I saw that FreeBSD was starting to boot, but then it fell into fatal error and dragged the laptop into reboot. Well, already something. Unlike Windows, of which there are only 4 versions, there is room for experimentation. Therefore, in further experiments, the same “executions” were subjected to OpenBSD, NetBSD, CentOS - in the hope that one of them would still start on a laptop.
Ubuntu
The first glimmer of hope gave ubuntu, more precisely, xubuntu. It was already loaded normally on a laptop, but ... only the first two or three times. Then she just hung up. Well, plus was all the same heavy for a laptop (too often the cooler was turned on).
Searching the Internet, I came across the lightest version - ubuntu-lite . Surprisingly, it was installed pretty quickly and confidently launched on a laptop. There have been no complaints against her for the last three months. In this photo, for example, you can see the start entry to the system:
findings
Thus, the laptop was reanimated and is now successfully used for reading electronic books and writing articles. In addition, it even got a web server, which I use for demonstrative purposes (when I need to go somewhere and show my work). The system is light, the processor warms poorly, the cooler hums rarely. With viruses, the problem is not so acute, but even if it hooks up (hmm, where would you find this when around Windows?), You can always reinstall the system.
And finally: even the most desperate situation (which turned out for me) can be solved with benefit for myself. And, of course, my voice in support of Linux-like systems!
Today I will talk about how I could put Linux from scratch on my ancient laptop. And this story would not be so interesting if there were no CD-ROM, floppy drive, or USB boot on this laptop.
Prehistory
')
So, in some immemorial times, I became the owner of the Toshiba Portege 7020 laptop (by the way, it is on it that I now type this text). Brief specifications: onboard Pentium II, 192 MB of RAM and a hard disk of 15 GB. Designed as a sticker on the case, for Windows 98, 2000. In principle, a good way to go on a camping trip. The undoubted advantage is the low weight, since the laptop, in fact, consists of the laptop itself and the docking station. Those. the road is enough to take the laptop itself, without a docking station.
At the time of purchase, I even managed to install Windows XP on him, and he pulled it pretty well. But I decided not to buy the docking station (due to inexperience), which played a fatal role, since all the drives were located on it.
My tears, my sadness
Since the laptop was marching, it is not difficult to guess that viruses soon picked up on it. Of course, there was some kind of antivirus, but it was completely unpretentious, since the percent of it was already barely pulling. If you add here a monstrous XP, heavy programs like Word and other “joys”, then soon the work on the laptop turned into sheer torment. Brakes, constant buzz of the cooler and strong body heat. Also viruses.
Having decided that I had enough, I pulled out a hard one, formatted it, bought an external box for it and turned it into a large USB flash drive. The laptop itself, alas, ah, moved for a long time to the mezzanine.
Attempts to install the system
I realized all the importance of the docking station when I tried again to put the system on the laptop. It was not there. Of all the methods of “communication” with the outside world, the laptop has only one USB connector and an infrared port. Sparely, frankly. Naturally, the BIOS does not support booting from USB.
The first attempt was a frontal one: we connect the hard drive to the main computer, put the system on it, and then rearrange it back to the laptop and try to boot there. All versions of Windows have refused to boot. There was even an attempt to rearrange the hard one in the first reboot, between copying the system files and installing the drivers and everything else. Fakir was drunk, the trick also failed.
Months went by ...
Gradually my outlook expanded, and I became acquainted with unix-like systems. My first “sexual” (in terms of active configuration :-)) partner was FreeBSD. It is known that it is initially installed with the support of a full set of equipment, i.e. all that is in the world is a piece of iron. Well, I thought, since it is installed in this way, there is a chance to deceive the system: install it on the main computer, and then switch it hard to a laptop.
For the purity of the experiments, the installation of the system was carried out in a virtual machine. In short, it is possible to use any hard disk completely under the virtual operating system. That is, all those files that appear during a normal installation are created on the disk.
Having done all the tricks, I saw that FreeBSD was starting to boot, but then it fell into fatal error and dragged the laptop into reboot. Well, already something. Unlike Windows, of which there are only 4 versions, there is room for experimentation. Therefore, in further experiments, the same “executions” were subjected to OpenBSD, NetBSD, CentOS - in the hope that one of them would still start on a laptop.
Ubuntu
The first glimmer of hope gave ubuntu, more precisely, xubuntu. It was already loaded normally on a laptop, but ... only the first two or three times. Then she just hung up. Well, plus was all the same heavy for a laptop (too often the cooler was turned on).
Searching the Internet, I came across the lightest version - ubuntu-lite . Surprisingly, it was installed pretty quickly and confidently launched on a laptop. There have been no complaints against her for the last three months. In this photo, for example, you can see the start entry to the system:
findings
Thus, the laptop was reanimated and is now successfully used for reading electronic books and writing articles. In addition, it even got a web server, which I use for demonstrative purposes (when I need to go somewhere and show my work). The system is light, the processor warms poorly, the cooler hums rarely. With viruses, the problem is not so acute, but even if it hooks up (hmm, where would you find this when around Windows?), You can always reinstall the system.
And finally: even the most desperate situation (which turned out for me) can be solved with benefit for myself. And, of course, my voice in support of Linux-like systems!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/87477/
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