Jtosh.com | the T is silent.

So this weekend I picked up a laptop from Robyn’s Dad, which is in exchange for a website I am building him. Its an older Sony Vaio PCG 505fx. I got the laptop which is really quiet a nice little machine, although a pretty outdated piece of hardware its just so awesomely tiny and lightweight. Its probably under 2lbs and is compact although its still functional. Its kind of like the MacBook Air in the fact they took out the floppy and disk drives, and all the extra ports to save space and weight, although even this old dog has a firewire port!

The specs are pretty minimal: 32mb of PC100 RAM, Intel Pentium 266mhz with MMX, ~4gb HDD, PCMIA PC card slot, 1 usb port, one I.link port, IR port, port replicator add-on with VGA, Serial, LPT, and serial/mouse PS/2 ports, removable speakers, external CD-ROM and FDD.

Its currently running Windows98 (not even SE!) with plus installed OEM. This laptop hasn’t really ever been used for much so there isn’t anything else on the HD. So I decided to try and turn it into a more functional piece of equipment then a win98 paperweight and see if I couldn’t install linux on it. I began the process of selecting a distro, which to me is one of the most complicated parts of linux that really holds it back. All the different flavors and branches that just confuse newbies. In the past I’ve just picked one and ran with it, because honestly I dont know the difference and everyone has their own opinion. I found some good articles with google and checked out distrowatch, and came up with three leading canidates. Deli Linux, SaxenOS, and PClinuxOS, mostly for their advertised ability to work with older slower hardware and smaller distro size. I’m also going to give Vector Linux a try, as I’ve gotten that running on older desktop hardware in the past, although I dont know if the lapto is going to have enough ram to handle Vector.

In the past I’ve only dabbled my fingers in the world of open source software. I know enough commands to get around and make myself a little dangerous, but I figure I will give it another try, if nothing else I’ll make a super small lightweight laptop that I can surf the web with or use at a coffee shop.

Next tasks include:

• Installing all 4 distro’s, trying them out, picking a winner and getting it going
• Dealing with the weirdness of any proprietary Sony hardware I may encounter once I get going
• Finding/Configuring a Wifi and ethernet adapter for the laptop
• Making it look good
• posting more info about this project as I come up with it.

So the idea is I am going to post all of my findings, headaches, and triumphs on here as a multi-part series so that maybe someone else can maybe learn from my mistakes and experiences.

And now its off to bed. As of late with the new job and my increased amount of exercise I find myself actually able to stay up later. I haven’t felt like I could stay up past 11 on a normal night at home in a long time, however I actually feel more metally sharp lately, even if my body has been more physically exhausted. However at a point the physical will triumph the mental and your pass out. ergo, where I am headed now.

Ohh, I’m also trying to stay up and see if Andrew ever puts his account back up on Ebay, I’m very excited to watch people get their panties in a bunch again. If nothing else it raises alot of questions about the value of your friends and online contacts, electronic identity, ownership of social data and online connections, and trust.

Posted on Monday, April 21st, 2008 at 11:45 pm in the category:computers, laptop, mylinuxlaptopseries. Comment RSS 2.0 feed. Comment it , or trackback this post.