The Old Laptop

[Jon Pruente]

Yep, been there, doing it again with another one.  I had used a
Toshiba Tecra 8000 w/ a dead battery to run DSL/Ubuntu/Xubuntu/custom
Ubuntu install w/ Fluxbox and it tended to decet most things fine,
except allt he sensors in the system.  A quick install of the Gnome HW
Mon applet and the lib-sensors set, and I could run sensors-detect to
get them found.

Now I'm on to an Armada 7800 (w/ 2hr battery) that doesn't get sound
easily, so it needs the particular sound module loaded though the
/etc/modules file.  I had tried using ndiswrapper to get an old 2wire
802.11g USB dongle working, but it tended to lockup the system, as
your's seems to.  For now I'm just sticking with my old trusty Lucent
chipped Dell TrueMobile 1150.  It's solid and reliable, and I haven't
had a (halfway recent) distro not work with it.  For WiFi on an old
laptop, I highly suggest getting an old Lucent ORiNoCo chipset PC
Card.  They should be very cheap, and be very reliable.

Jon.

On 4/4/07, Jonathan Hutchins <hutchins at tarcanfel.org> wrote:
> kubuntu is frustratingly slow on this thing.  Even running from CD, DSL is
> faster.
>
> I haven't been able to get my wg111t USB Wireless Adapter to work.  It "just
> worked" in Mandriva without any tweaking, just straight forward install.
>
> Searching the net, it seems a lot of people have had this problem with
> debian-branch distros.  There is some confusion on what version of
> ndiswrapper-utils should be installed, and of course manual compiles seem to
> work better, but I'm thinking that the ancient USB chipset in this box may be
> the culprit.  Unplugging the dongle after loading ndiswrapper causes the
> system to lock up.
>
> There is no sign of a sound system being detected; even lspci doesn't show
> anything.  Sure wish I'd copied the configuration from the Mandrake 9.1
> install!  That eliminates use as a garage jukebox.
>
> Given that I can buy a brand-new laptop from Micro Center for less than $500,
> there's only a certain amount of head banging that's worth doing for a laptop
> with no battery.
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