Finally giving ubuntu a shot!

My parents' laptop had the monitor die, so it's in the shop.

Now that they are dying without it, I decided to pull out an old Toshiba Satellite, with Pentium 3, and give the newest version of Ubuntu a shot.

I'd love to give you a run down on whether it works or not. But it's taking AGES to get through the 7 install steps...

And it sounds like the old CD drive is having a conniption fit.

I was just wondering, however, on whether or not it's going to be difficult to get this expresscard wireless G thing working. Or if it's going to be downright impossible!

Wish me luck... I seem to be stuck on initializing partition thing.

 

You're installing Hardy? 32bit?

 

Yes. 32 bit of the newest download available on the site.

Is there an older version that would run faster?

I'm STILL getting busy sign waiting for the partition window..

Heh.

EDIT:

OMG! Somethings happening! screen went black but it's still working! And the mouse is responding faster.

 

xubuntu is supposed to be faster on older hardware.

 

I'll look into it if this doesn't come off black screen in 20 minutes.

 

With an old machine like that I would try a leaner distro and or a leaner window manager like Fluxbox. Just a suggestion to get acceptable performance from the machine.

 

I'll take any suggestions you have for a leaner distro, like.... The leanest distro of linux that may support expresscard wireless.

And it went from black screen to not fully loaded window...

...Could I finally be nearing the highly anticipated step 4???

 

hahaha.. Poor boy.

Xubuntu is a good place to start. You can just install the wireless support if there isn't any out of the box. (Never used Xubuntu before, so I have no idea.)

 

Will shutting down the laptop while it's trying to install a OS farg up my HD physically.

It already sounds like a war in there.

 

Physically, mechanically, no. It might cause errors, though. But you haven't formatted it yet, right?

 

I don't think so.

It's just kind of... black.

It had corruption when my brother had xp on it and wouldn't boot... So I booted from ubuntu CD...

And now I'm here.

 

Hmm.. There *might* be some physical damage, in that case. Exactly, how old is it? You can give it another shot, if it still won't go past the partition stage, then it means the disk is damaged.

Alternatively, you can use gparted to check if it has any errors first.

 

I'll just try to install xbuntu..

It's a pretty old laptop... can't remember the exact date though.

I've had a feeling the HD has been going down for awhile...

I just dun want it to be true!

 

Denial is only the beginning, trust me..

 

Xubuntu is going strong so far.

It's partitioning...

And getting to this point took 2 minutes!

I'm baffled at how much faster it's going!

 

Xubuntu is working good, besides the expresscard wireless not working.. :[

But I can plug in.

My issue right now is the fact that I only have a 800x600 space on my screen used up...

How do I get xubuntu to use the whole screen if I can't use executable driver files?

 

I have no idea with Xubuntu. Try google, ubuntuforums.org, or some other people on this forum.

 

I'm on the laptop with xubuntu right now.

This laptop has never run so smoothly.

I fixed the screen problem, but gave up on wireless... Just plugging in.

I'm really impressed, and am slowly falling in love with xubuntu.

 

Glad to hear it. What wireless is this?

 

It's a linksys expresscard G wireless card.

On windows it requires the CD to set up... So I have feelinhg it's just not going to come over to the light side of the force.

 

I'm sure you can. Linksys will have drivers available to download from it's website. If they don't have a linux driver, just use ndiswrapper with their windows driver.

 

That's because software installation on Windows is very different from on Linux. Ask on LinuxQuestions.org and on the Ubuntu Forums. As zephyrus17 said, ndiswrapper can usually let you use the card if there's only a Windows driver, but if you can find a tutorial for your particular card, you don't even have to figure out the process.

 

Yeap. Worse comes to worst, you can just install a generic wireless driver. Something like vesa for graphics cards.

 

If you open up a terminal and type 'lspci' without the quotes, and copy and paste the output here, we can figure out what you need.

 

You can install lighter and heavier desktops on any 'buntu.

 

i had wireless problems with ubuntu to do with the chipset on my laptop. some wirelss cards are not supported or need abit of work to get sorted. other than that ubuntu is a fast and stable OS.

 

QFE. Especially if you use Broadcom Wireless. Heh. May the Force be with you.

 

Why are you installing from the graphical installer in the first place???? Go get the alternate cd and install ubuntu with that...

 

It's working great plugged in.

Really fast, unless you try to tab too many pages. I think the Pentium 3 and 256 ram struggles wit hthat.

Should I look into this Vesa graphics driver? I don't have any graphics drivers installed...

I looked for a while... But CyberBlade IGP seems to have fell off the road map.

 

Have you already tried the "trident" driver? Vesa is ok as a fallback and should work with almost every video card you'll find in a computer that can run Linux, but it does only provide the really basic stuff.

 

Meh, I've never had a problem.
Easy for me lol.
Full bandwith, as well.

 

My Broadcom card has been decent with Linux; however, it performs slightly better in Windoze.

 

I haven't personally tried any drivers for the IGP yet... I can't imagine it would give the laptop any noticeable boost. It already works better than it did under windows XP with all drivers.

I'm pretty impressed!