Thanks everybody for all your kindly inputs. Finally I got one Linux, which fits my sister's 1997 old-laptop, the xandros server edition 1.0. Here is a status update. I did remove the 128M PC133 notebook-ram from my wife's notebook (a 2000 jetbook model, cost $2000) and add it to my sister's laptop (1997 alcam model, cost $1750), so my sister's laptop now gets 192M RAM. (a mixture of PC100 RAM and PC133 RAM. The mixture doesn't work on my wife's laptop, The PC100 RAM and the PC133 RAM can be detected when only one is installed. It just doesn't work when both installed. I don't know why. ) Since I got two PCMCIA wireless card, I add one to my sister's 97 machine. After I put all the hardware together and cleaned the machine, I tried again the Ubutun 7.04. no luck. My guess is it might just need at least 256M RAM to run the newest Ubuntu. So I turned around finding some older version of linuxs available. First installed the xandros business edition (bought on 2006), no support on the wireless card. Then tried the xandros server edition 1.0, it supports the Netgear wireless card. This is great. Now the old machine has the high speed 54M wireless connection, and I can use my yahoo mail and reply mails. The speed is ok. (I tried the same wifi card on windows 2000 on this machine before, it cannot load the driver.) By the way, I only installed FTP server function and Web serer function . Neither seems working under this machine. (It did work on my wife's notebook with 128M RAM. It could be CPU/hardware related.) Anyhow, once we got the wireless working, we are happy. I also downloaded the xubuntu 7.10, will try when I get more PC133/PC100 memory for my wife's laptop and some extra time. regards, Funny N. New Bedford, MA http://www.AuElectronics.selfip.com ----- Original Message ---- From: Byron Jeff To: Microcontroller discussion list - Public. Sent: Sunday, December 2, 2007 8:17:52 AM Subject: Re: [EE][OT] Linux recommendation for old laptops. On Sat, Dec 01, 2007 at 02:54:58PM -0800, Funny NYPD wrote: > I told my sister the story about "Linux for old machines", she responded: > can you install a Linux on my old 1998 laptop? Ah, you got the challenge! > I tried Ubuntu 7.04, and found it require minimum memory of 256M. I > didn't find this until it shows: "out of memory, kill process 4923, score > 58 or a child". The installation failed. A typical modern Linux installation has a ton of memory heavy resources. Everything from web browsers to desktop exnvironments suck up a ton of memory and processing power. So you have to go off the beaten path to find lighter weight resources. Two that's I've found just in about 5 minutes of poking around Google are Puppy Linux (http://www.puppylinux.org) and Xubuntu (http://www.xubuntu.org/) > I tried the same disc on desktops before, but all of them got 256M or > more memory. So I didn't realize there is a minimum memory requirement. Yes there is. And it makes sense. There's no good reason to target an average distribution for minimal memory when the average desktop is somewhere between 1G and 2G of RAM. I just picked up 2G of 6400 DDR2 RAM from $30 after rebate on black friday. > My sister's laptop used to run a Win98 then Windows 2000, with only 64M > RAM. Runs slow but fine for office applications with Windows. You can get about the same response with one of the lightweight Linux distributions. The speed is the issue. When you only have 64M of ram you're going to have to have a decent swap partition. But once you start swapping, the speed of the machine degrades as a function of the amount of swap you need to hold active applications. So the lighter the apps, then the less swap you need, and therefore the better performance you'll get. > Curious: is this only for Ubuntu 7.04? Or all current Linux distribution > all require 256M or above Memory? All standard distributions do. You load X, Gnome/KDE, Firefox, and OpenOffice, and you're pushing a ton of memory already. I just checked on my machine and with nothing more than the four above and a PDF viewer I'm already clocking 700M. So the upshot it not getting it working. You can do that simply by creating a swap paritition on the hard disk before installing. The upshot is to get it working efficintly enough to be usable. > By the way, my wife also has a laptop with 128M memory, now runs Windows 2000. Very slow machine. > Any suggestion? Of course there is another possible path: Get more RAM. My son just game me a laptop that currently has 192M. But it's upgradable to 320M by swapping in a 256M PC100 SoDimm. Every byte of RAM that you have lessens the load on your swap which improves performance. So can you upgrade the memory on the laptops? Lightweight Linux management takes a combination of these techniques. Hope this helps, BAJ > > Funny N. > New Bedford, MA > http://www.AuElectronics.selfip.com > > > > ----- Original Message ---- > From: Dario Greggio > To: Microcontroller discussion list - Public. > Sent: Saturday, December 1, 2007 2:55:34 PM > Subject: Re: [OT] Car purchase > > Xiaofan Chen wrote: > > It is lucky that you can ride a bike. I wish I could ride a bike to work > > (it is really not far away) but it is not safe here to ride a bike at all > > as the road is not friendly to cyclists here in Singapore. > > I've started using bike for going to customers' some 4 years ago, after > a lot of time without riding a bicycle at all. > > I use it when distance is not longer than some 7-10Km. I don't care > arriving there in shorts or sweaty - after all I'm just a computer guy :-)) > > It's not this simple to go by bicycle in Turin, Italy too... but worth to. > > -- > Ciao, Dario > -- > http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive > View/change your membership options at > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist > > > ____________________________________________________________________________________ > Be a better pen pal. > Text or chat with friends inside Yahoo! Mail. See how. http://overview.mail.yahoo.com/ > -- > http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive > View/change your membership options at > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist ____________________________________________________________________________________ Looking for last minute shopping deals? Find them fast with Yahoo! 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