“Laptop revival stories usually describe detailed procedures for installing Linux and device drivers on a specific make of laptop. This article is more general. How do you go about making an old laptop useful? What steps are involved? Which Linux distributions will work? We’ll even discuss how Windows and dual-booting fit into the picture.”
I have a PII-400Mhz laptop running Xubuntu. 360 MB RAM, 10GB HDD, DVD-ROM. I use it for software development, it even runs “heavyweight” apps like Eclipse reasonably well.
Has a mach64 (rage pro) graphics card, so I was even able to get 3D accelleration working under Xubuntu 6.06, although with a whopping 8MB of VRAM, it’s really only used for glxgears and desk3d.
Basically had no issues getting it set up, although it was a bit picky about the CD, I had to burn at a lower speed or I would get read errors.
All of these laptops cost me between $20 and $100:
486 DX2-50, 12MB ram, BasicLinux (slackware 4.0 based)
P90, 48MB Ram, Debian Sarge
P-233, 64 MB Ram, OpenBSD
P-233, 160 MB Ram, Slackware
PII-266, 192 MB Ram, OpenBSD
On the lower-end machines I run Blackbox and use either links2 (graphic mode) or epiphany for web surfing (except the 486, it’s text only).
The machines with > 128MB ram do just fine with Gnome and Firefox.
They are all wireless except the 486.
Actually, I just loaned the P-233 with 160MB to one of my kids – had to put Win2k on in – he didn’t know how to infest Slackware with Spyware/Viruses!
Coming soon to a theater near you, laptoplibre.com!
to protect my two networks at home (both are ADSL networks)
it handles the hardware just fine (both are in docked scenarios)
to me, having older hardware IS useful as they can be used to do mundane tasks such as iptables filtering, IDS, web caching, internet sharing and more. And of course you can ssh in to see whats going on. I just set them up and leave them gathering dust basically.
for those of you who may/may not be aware of smoothwall, then give it a try on your old box/laptop !
well worth a try > http://www.smoothwall.org/get/
cheers
anyweb
Well written article, distro agnostic, focussig on the right tool able to do the job. The Windows side of the dual boot install was also discussed in a practical manner.
Damn! I’d love to find a working laptop like that! Score!
Overall a good overview of the various Linuxes, the dual boot w/ Windows (you will pry the W98SE* disks out of my cold, dead hands) options, and the fact that older hardware is still quite useful if you don’t need to have the latest and greatest.
(It has me just itching to try Xubuntu or Puppy on the Gateway 3150 at my husband’s store … but since that is a dedicated machine for running a Windows only program, I’d better not.)
—
* For all its flaws, W98SE will always have a sweet spot in my heart. It really was the pinnacle of the non NT based Windows OSes.
Whoever said that Linux is a great option for common “desktop” tasks on old hardware has never tried it.
Options like DSL are simply pathetic. Yes, DSL is Linux, and it doesn’t run extremely slow, but it is cluttered, difficult to use, and has terrible hardware support. No CUPS printing? Siag office? Antiword? No volume control available in the system tray? That is not sufficient to be even reasonably productive at home or in the office.
Upgrading to a “Normal” desktop distro such as Ubuntu or SUSE, although significantly increasing productivity and giving much better hardware support, perform terribly on old hardware. Take for example an old laptop, Pentium 233, 64MB of RAM. Cold boot times to a usuable Gnome or KDE desktop can take as long as five minutes. Contrary to popular belief, XFCE is sluggish and unusable with less than 128MB of RAM. OpenOffice will take approximatetely **five minutes** to launch. If Firefox is needed at the same time, give it another two minutes. This is absolutely unacceptable. Even lightweight options such as Abiword are essentially unusable with less than 128MB of RAM, and even worse if one wants to use more than one application concurrently.
Unfortunately, Windows with MS Office is the only viable option on old hardware. Yes, it is extremely expensive, riddled with security holes, requires manual installation of a plethora of drivers for all common hardware components, and some versions are unstable. But the performance of a well functioning Windows system on old hardware is just unbeatable. Windows 2000 Pro runs great on a Pentium 233 with 32MB of RAM. Internet Explorer launches in just a few seconds, as do Outlook and the MS Office programs, even when running concurrently. Add a quick image viewer like Irfanview, and Foxit PDF reader, and it is ready to go for the most common tasks. Just never open unknown e-mail attachments, and don’t browse to shady websites, and the system will be secure enough. Windows 2000 can run for weeks without needing a reboot. This is “good enough” for desktop usage. If Windows slows down after a few months of use, re-install it. At least some use will have been obtained from the old hardware. On the other hand, an otherwise capable desktop Linux distro performs like a virus and spyware infested, fragmented, unmaintained, ten year old Windows 95 installation from the very first boot, when running on old hardware.
I hate Windows more than most users here, but after years of trying to use Linux on an old laptop, I have given up. I am forced to admit that for the average user who doesn’t have the money or the desire to buy new hardware components all the time, mainstream Linux is not the answer.
Fortunately, though, these old machines can be put to good use as servers, as one post mentioned above. Linux excels at server tasks, which more than compensates for its poor desktop performance.
“Windows…. Yes, it is extremely expensive, riddled with security holes, requires manual installation of a plethora of drivers for all common hardware components, and some versions are unstable.”
And you say linux is bad? Hah I think you are reading the manual upside down. Linux outperforms windows everytime on older hardware and you don’t have to run some castrated distribution to see those results. Slackware 10.2 will install on a 486 with 16mb RAM. It will even run X if you want it too (best getting KDrive instead). I think you might be going wrong with your choice of Distro/Software. I would hardly expect anything designed on todays hardware to run on older systems with 1/20th the amount of memory. Suse 10 runs bad on a P4 so I would hardly expect it to even run on an older system. If you absolutely HAVE to use a major distro, don’y use the latest and greatest. Go back and find a CD with an older version on it (like Suse 7 or Redhat 5.2) they will run much better and most of the time there is really no reason to upgrade them.
“I hate Windows more than most users here..”
If that was true then you wouldn’t have made the above statement about Windows being the best choice for old hardware.
Anyways I am not trying to argue with you or prove you wrong, I am just thinking that maybe you are applying the wrong technique to getting Linux on old hardware.
I know. It’s 2006, a “rich” www and 16 bit colors minimum on the desktop.
Still I can clearly remember my first Linux install, RedHat 4.2, on a K5/133 MHz 24MiB RAM machine. It booted into X (3.3.6) and at that time (1997 or 1998, not sure) it was a pretty decent desktop. I could run SSH. I could browse the web (Netscape 4.something). It played music from CDs and also MP3s (though that took some 80%-90% of the CPU.
Every machine I had since then (quite a few) could run Linux as a desktop.
Heck, I even run a Linux desktop on a 75 MHz Pentium laptop with 16 MiB of ram. 2.2.x kernel, X 3.3.6 (4.x was available at that time, but the driver for the graphics card at hand was borked), “wm2” window manager, rxvt, and w3m for browsing the web. As my first laptop, made me quite happy in cca. 2000, 2001
Yes, OOo takes long to start, but that’s not Linux’s fault. It’s OOo’s fault. Ditto for Firefox (compare to Opera or Kazehakase).
As the author of the article said – you have to have realistic expectations. Choose *box, WindowMaker, pekwm, ratpoison, wm2, twm. Choose rxvt. Choose Opera, Kazehakase. Choose vim + latex for writing (I ran latex on that aforementioned laptop – learned me to concentrate on writing first, looks later). Choose antiword for reading. Choose qiv for pictures. Choose alsamixer. Choose Sylpheed, mutt for mails. Choose irssi for irc and silc. Choose centericq for IM. Choose mplayer for movies. Choose madplay for music. Choose “uglier” and less “comfortable” desktop or choose a more expensive hardware. Your choice. Or choose utilizing VNC / remote X.
(I really don’t consider volume control on taskbar a prerequisite for a functional desktop.)
You’re looking at this from the wrong perspective. Did you even read the article? I think the author was making a point that running Windows is fine, but if you want to add a lot more potential, use Linux and free software. It’s a fact, Linux enables old computers to run a modern operating system. You couldn’t run Windows XP on a laptop with less than 500MB of HD capacity and 16MB of RAM, and even if you could, it would hardly be considered practical.
Windows 2000 Pro runs great on a Pentium 233 with 32MB of RAM. Internet Explorer launches in just a few seconds, as do Outlook and the MS Office programs, even when running concurrently.
I don’t believe this at all. You’re saying you are running Win2k Pro in 32mb of RAM, with all its updates, with uptodate versions of Internet Explorer, Outlook and MS Office, all running concurrently, and all applications launch in a few seconds and are responsive? Sorry, but that’s complete bullshit.
Check the Microsoft webpage on the Windows 2000 Pro:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/professional/evaluation/sysreq…
Oh yeah, you read that right: “At least 64 megabytes (MB) of RAM; more memory generally improves responsiveness.”
Aside from that, as far as Windows operating systems go, I quite like Windows 2000 Professional, it’s a good, stable OS. I do prefer linux though, and I rarely use Windows for something else than games these days. However, I have a Win2k running on a Pentium MMX 166Mhz with 160mb ram. Obviously, with that amount of memory, memory is not an issue. Time from bootup to desktop is long (but Windows 2000 is not that fast in booting on newer machines either). Still, it is kinda slow and for a lot of people probably too slow. Especially rendering websites in an uptodate Firefox or Internet Explorer is slow. As office software, there’s Office 97 on it, which is still doing remarkably well. That machine also has USB ports and it reads from USB memory sticks with no problem at all. It also has a new USB scanner connected (even though I needed to hack the installer, since it stupidly refused to install on anything less than 233Mhz), which works slowly, but for the rest just fine. It also has a HP Laserjet 5L connected which it shares over the network. Anyways, it’s a slow machine, but it’s still my mum’s main machine.
So, yeah, Windows 2000 Pro is still very capable on older hardware, but you will need enough ram in my opinion and something like 200Mhz or better. 32mb ram definitely won’t do. 64mb ram will be tight, but might be enough for 1 application at a time. 128mb would be better.
I also like how you say Add a quick image viewer like Irfanview, and Foxit PDF reader, and it is ready to go for the most common tasks.. So, you chose very small and efficient software on the Windows side, while chosing bloated things like KDE/Gnome/OpenOffice on the Linux side? Also, I don’t believe at all that Abiword is unusable with less than 128mb ram.
Now, onto the linux side of the story.
My first gripe is that you compare Windows 2000, which dates from around 2001 if i’m not mistaken, to a linux distro which has been released only a couple of months ago (difference of at least 5 years). And then you proudly say that Windows performs better. Don’t you think that’s actually completely obvious?
Anyways, I also did install Ubuntu 5.10 on the Pentium 166Mhz with 160mb RAM some time ago. Install went fine. Well, except that I had to use the VESA driver for the graphics card. Everything ran.. I mean, the whole Gnome desktop, but it was too slow for regular use. Slower than the Windows 2k Pro install. However, it works just fine in text mode and it worked also fine as a terminal server. My brother used it for sometime to remotely log in on my Pentium 4 via XDMCP (GDM makes this very simple and easy), and for this purpose it actually worked perfectly. This is in fact also a great use for older hardware, because even my older Pentium 4 (1.7Ghz/768Mb RAM) handles 2 demanding users without any problem.
However, if I would actually be using the linux install on that machine, I’d install Debian and chose my software wisely. I would love to try e17 on it, but if that is too expensive in cpu time, I’d chose from windowmaker, blackbox, fvwm, icewm, xfce3 or e16. Those are not complete desktop environments, but are very good window managers and very performant. As a browser, I would probably go for Opera or Galeon, for postscript with gv, for pdf with xpdf, for mp3/ogg with xmms, for pictures with gqview, for text editing and programming with emacs, for im with gaim, for mail with wanderlust in emacs or pine…
Other options are to just completely stick to Debian 3.0 (released july 2002, got security updates untill a couple of months ago). This release will run just fine on an older pentium, even graphically with only 64mb of ram. If I’m not mistaken, it still comes with Xfce3.
Or one could run a current Debian release and decide to stick to GTK1 (instead of running applications which rely on GTK2, which is a lot heavier). I’m not 100% sure, but I believe up until recently firefox could still be compiled for GTK1. Or you could use an older version of Galeon. You would also need an older GTK1 version of GQview.
Anyways, my point is that, yeah, on a linux distro, you will need to chose your software wisely, in exactly the same way that you tell us that we should run Foxit PDF reader on Windows instead of the ‘standard’ Adobe Acrobat Reader.
I hate Windows more than most users here, but after years of trying to use Linux on an old laptop, I have given up. I am forced to admit that for the average user who doesn’t have the money or the desire to buy new hardware components all the time, mainstream Linux is not the answer.
If you mean with “mainstream linux” a linux distro like Ubuntu released only a couple of months ago, and you are not willing to chose your software carefully, then yeah, it’s not gonna work very well. But “mainstream windows” is not the answer either, since that would mean uptodate Windows XP, IE, MS Office software, Adobe Acrobat Reader and so on.
If you want to do something useful with older hardware, you’ll need to make careful software choices and be willing to sacrifice some features. I think I’ve said this before. Linux gives you the ability to build a capable environment on older hardware. It doesn’t come in a nice, polished package though. (well, unless you just take an older linux distro release and install from that…)
My old laptop is a HP Omnibook 4150 running at 366 mhz with 128 meg of ram and a wireless card. I run Mandriva 2006 with Fluxbox as my desktop. Runs great.
I managed to procure an old Laptop with these specs:
486DX 44Mhz
16Mb RAM
320Mb HDD
Floppy (No CD-ROM)
As you can see the only non-invasive method to getting linux on there was to do a big floppy-swap with Slackware or the like. Instead I managed to remove the HDD and put it into a laptop at work that had a CD-ROM. I installed Slackware 10.2 with a minimum of packages (80Mb installed… WOW!). All I had to do after that was put the HDD back in my laptop and she was ready to go.
While I have a system on their, I don’t quite have a use for it just yet so their are no functionality oriented packages installed on their (office or Network Admin apps). It doesn’t have X or development libraries, but I am thinking of loading KDrive for X and GCC + uClibC for development.
All in all I was surprised to be running a current distro on such old hardware, but with a little time and effort I managed to get it on their and it runs beautifully!
Edited 2006-08-02 22:57
A really good article.
I’d like to _add_ some points (not a critique of the article)
Try before you buy, without the quotes. Boot the laptop from a Live CD before buying it. Easier to check if everything (everything you want) works. Run lspci to identify devices, write down IDs / names, check if they are supported and how well. Does not support booting from CD? In 2006, I’d really reconsider buying such a machine.
Disks can be upgraded too, usually. And for some models, optical drives can be upgraded as well (not IBM, Dell, which have different face plates on them). These often are not “user-serviceable parts”, but chances are you were not getting a long guarantee on the laptop anyway, being second-hand. So if you trust your photographic memory (where all the screws go) and have a steady hand with the screw-driver, you can give it a chance.
Often you can even get new batteries – built-in UPS, should it be destined to be a server / router. Which actually are good roles for a laptop, being small and quiet. With a USB2 card in the PC-Card slot, it can be a rather good file-server or backups-holding-server. Or a remote-controlled jukebox (hint: Music Player Daemon)
Other components being unchangeable also has a positive side – easier to check, how well the given laptop is supported by Linux.
One thing I don’t recommend is compiling Gentoo on such a machine directly. Tried it once, the IBM X20’s batter did not like giving juice to a CPU running on 100% for a few days and decided not to be a battery again. Maybe bad luck, but I personally won’t try that again.
Sitting in my closet at home I have a Compaq Contura 430. 486dx 100 with 16m of RAM. 750mb hard drive. Floppy drive. No Modem, no ethernet. Old skool PC card slots. Way before the days of USB.
Capable of booting several of the Linxues. But probably not to a graphical environment.
Or, I can leave DOS 6 and Windows 3.1 on it and have a lightning fast machine with a GUI and Word 6.0 on it.
For all the things they don’t do, there is a case for running or dual booting the older Windows OSes on older hardware. You get a GUI with minimal processor and RAM. You can run an older copy of office. It depends on what the intended use is and who the machine is for.
If you really need a modern OS to run on your old hardware, by all means, Linux.
But if you don’t need all the modern bells and whistles and aren’t going on line, but are typing letters and playing some older games? Go Windows.
(And kudos to the author of the article for taking the time to point out what you really need to do to bring an older Windows machine on-line securely.)
Secretary: “IT guy, fix my computer please! Windows crashes almost every day, and I got a virus after running an attachment from [email protected] .”
IT Guy: “OK, I’ll put Vector Linux on it, since it’s an old computer with 64MB RAM. Should run great.”
[2 hours later]
Secretary: “OK, I clicked on the start menu, why doesn’t it come up?”
IT Guy: “Well, you just have to be patient, it just takes 10 seconds to generate the menu…. See, there it is.”
Secretary: “OK…. Let’s see, OpenOffice Impress must be the Powerpoint program….[clicks]…. Why isn’t anything happening?”
IT Guy: “Oh, that program is just a little slow to load, give it 5 or 10 minutes.”
Secretary: [comes back from coffee break] “Ok, let me see if I can open the NewProduct presentation… [clicks on File menu]…What’s the matter with this stupid thing?”
IT Guy: “Just wait… look, see, the menu’s already coming up…. There, the “open” item just appeared. Try clicking it now.”
Secretary: “I did, how do you open files? I don’t see anything! Before I just opened Powerpoint and opened my files, and they just came up”
IT Guy: “You just have to be patient. You’ll see… Wait NO!!! Don’t try to open Firefox and surf while you wait, it’s trying to load the file chooser for OpenOffice, you have to wait for that to finish first….Yes I know, your mouse isn’t going to move for a while now. It’s not frozen though, Linux is very stable. But since you opened Firefox too, you’ll have to wait for the computer to catch up. Why don’t you go get some more coffee?”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I’m not kidding either. I manage the network at work, and I’ve tried Linux on our old desktop computers. If you don’t believe me, try booting your desktop with the kernel option “mem=64M”.
You really like to compare brand-new linux distros and software with old windows releases and software, so you can claim that linux is no good on older hardware. I was going to reply on your other post, and I probably will after this one.
First, I agree that, yes, 64mb RAM is not going to be a lot to run a linux distro which has been released only a couple of months ago. And yes, 64mb RAM is not going to be enough to run versions of OpenOffice and Firefox that were released only a couple of months ago.
Second, I don’t believe that that same computer would run Windows XP Pro (which dates from 2001!) fluently with only 64mb RAM. Even the website from Microsoft says so:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/evaluation/sysreqs.mspx
Yeah, 64mb ram is supported as a bare minimum. You can say whatever you want, but I don’t believe your secretary is gonna be very happy about the performance when she is running Internet Explorer, Outlook and MS Office at the same time. (all uptodate versions of those programs of course) I am 100% sure that the performance will be very close to the performance that you describe when she would be using Linux.
Also… that’s not a very smart IT guy. Fire him. First, he can’t administrate his network so as to force incoming email through a virus scanner. Second, he is not capable in decently installing and administrating a Windows box (nope, Windows XP does not crash almost every day, unless you’re doing something wrong). Third, he should have just ordered some extra ram for that machine. That would expand its lifetime, would cost almost nothing and would boost performance immensely on Windows XP (given that the cpu is still something decent… Pentium 3 500Mhz or something like that).
There are quite a few 486 success stories here. When I read the article and it discarded Pentium II laptops as old, I thought I better tell you about the 486 laptop I’m running, but seems like I’m not the only one.
I have an HP Omnibook 4000CT laptop, with Intel 486 DX4 running at 75 MHz, 8 MB RAM, WD90C24 SVGA display controller, ESS688 soundcard, a 3.5″ floppy disk drive, and a 512 MB CompactFlash card replacing the hard disk. The CF card is connected straight to the IDE bus with an appropriate adapter. The laptop is fanless, with no moving parts (except the floppy drive), so naturally it’s quite quiet. The battery is dead, though, so I’m not carrying the thing around much.
I’m running Slackware 10.1 on it. The installation was a bit unorthodox, as I didn’t have a CF reader at that time. Otherwise I would have simply copied the files over with my desktop PC. I plugged in a null modem serial cable and booted Pocket Linux(* from a floppy, then established a PPP connection between the laptop and the desktop with pppd. I copied the Slackware a-series and parts of ap and n to the CF card, unpacked, chrooted, reinstalled with installpkg, and little things like that. There are instructions how to do a harddisk installation like that in Slackbook(**, for example.
The system takes maybe 90 MB of disk space. It could be trimmed down by removing documentation and unnecessary packages, though.
I’m not using X on it. Forget about it. With 8 MB of RAM, I could probably launch XFree86 3.3.6, although using it would be hopeless. I rather like the “minimalism” of the console for a change. I even played MP3 files with it, although anything above 96 kbps won’t work. I suspect it’s a problem with data transfer, not actually decoding the data. Oh, and Dosemu works (somewhat) with this setup. I was able to play many DOS games whose hardware requirements are 486 and 4 MB of RAM. Protected mode games didn’t work, which is a shame.
The kernel I’m using is 2.4.32. 2.6 works, but seems to consume more precious memory. I have a brandless wireless PCMCIA adapter which has drivers for 2.6 kernels, but I couldn’t get it to work on the laptop. Could be inexperience with PCMCIA adapters in general or simply a hardware incompatibility. The only network connection the laptop has is a PPP link to the desktop PC. Buying a $30 Ethernet adapter is possible, but the adapter alone would have more real value than the laptop. I’m not too keen to do that.
*) http://www.pocket-lnx.org/
**) http://www.slackbook.org/
EDIT: Actually, Slackbook doesn’t seem to have a section I thought it had. Oh well.
Edited 2006-08-03 06:27
I used to use an old laptop with a 166MHz Pentium I CPU, and 8MB of RAM. I ran Debian Woody on it and it worked like a charm. No X of course, but a great laptop none the less.
I’d still be using it, but the motherboard crapped out.
I use my old Dell laptop (P2 333MHz, 192MB RAM, 6GB disk) as a web/Subversion/printer server. It’s got XP on it though because I didn’t believe Linux (or FreeBSD) would support various laptop power-saving things… not that I have a server hibernate when it’s not in use, but I do like turning off the hard disk after a period of inactivity. I doubt laptop hard drives are designed to run 24/7…
I’m running out of disk space though, so I might switch it to FreeBSD if I can verify that it’ll be able to put the disk to sleep.
– chrish
If you’re only interested in turning off the hard disk after a period of inactivity, you should use the “hdparm” utility on linux. “laptop mode tools” is a package which does several things regarding power management, but with support from the kernel it can delay disk writes as much as possible to delay spinning the harddisk up. When the harddisk is spinned up (because of a read for example), it does all the delayed writes at once. This is meant for typical laptop use, to avoid too much spinning up and spinning down and to make the battery last longer. The linux kernel also supports frequency scaling for cpus that support that, but I don’t know whether that P2 supports that. And on my desktop, I have suspend-to-disk working, which is just great.
Anyways, yeah, Linux does support all kinds of power saving things. Hdparm (and laptop-mode-tools, if you want it) will definitely do what you want with the harddisk. Things like suspend-to-ram and suspend-to-disk depend on your hardware and can be problematic.
Btw, if you’re using that machine purely as a server, I think you’ll be much better off with Linux or FreeBSD than with WinXP. I’m sure that FreeBSD has a utility that’s similar to hdparm for the hard disk.
Find a five year old Linux compatible office suite, web browser, and e-mail client that have a feature set and performance comparible to the Microsoft offerings of that same era, and I will gladly use them.
The problem is that only within the past two years or so has Linux become truly usuable on the desktop. Microsoft Office was excellent ever since Office 97, and the first truly stable Windows offering that supported modern hardware was Windows 2000 Pro. Back in the early 2000’s, on the other hand, Linux desktop applications were pitiful when compared with the Microsoft offerings of that same time period.
It appears that now the tide is turning with Microsoft offerings. KDE, Gnome, Firefox, and OpenOffice actually have much better performance than they did five years ago, or compared to when they first came out. Microsoft products though, are gradually but perceivably becoming more and more bloated in terms of memory and disk usage. With Windows Vista, it appears that system requirements will drastically increase. In a few years, I imagine that this argument would be overwhelmingly in favor of Linux on the desktop for five or seven year old hardware, as Microsoft’s hardware requirements spiral out of control.