Turn my old super thin p2 266 laptop to a netbook

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fuelvolts

[H]ard|Gawd
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Is it worth it? I have an old Toshiba notebook. It has a p2 266 with 256mb RAM and 10gb hard drive. The reason I want to use this as a netbook is that it has a 12" screen and could give the air a run for its money in thinness. It was REALLY expensive back in the day and came with Win 98. I think my Dad paid around $2500 for it in 1998. It might be faster than a 266, but I doubt it as that was the lowest wattage CPU out at the time. That chip only sips about 9w TDP.

I want to turn it into a netbook. It still holds a decent charge (about 2 hrs) and I can get a new battery for about $50. What flavor of linux should I put on it so I can just run firefox, some mp3s and occasionally open office.

I was thinking of Ubuntu 8.10 MID, but I can't find a download for that. Others? I can't upgrade the HD because it's a 1.8" with a lousy proprietary connector.

I'm at worka nd don't have the exact model number, but I will update later. Thanks!
 
All releases of Ubuntu 8.10 are available here (MID included). There's a bunch of small distros listed here with brief intros of them.


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Thanks for that link. The only problem is that there is no torrent for mid in that list. Only direct download. My company school internet limits downloads to 45k/sec, but doesn't limit torrents. I'm downloading mid now @ 38k/sec :( It's gonna take all freakin day!
 
So its like 45kbs per connection or something? just use a download manager that opens several connections at once. orbit, etc...
 
well, the download keeps failing, so I'm just gonna wait till I get home.

Still, will it even run properly on my old laptop? Should I just go with DSL?
 
What if you made the laptop into a thin client? So it would use the monitor, keyboard and mouse of your laptop but have the power of your main pc.
 
I think its an idea for a fun project but just be aware that it might not be a modern netbook "killer". If you are looking for the best "out of the box" experience then download and burn a bunch of different light distros to try. I think you should stay away from Ubuntu as its a bit on the "heavy" side. Here's a list for you:

DSL
Any XFCE distro (mint and sidux would be my first choices)
Vector Linux Lite

Any lighter and you will be doing quite a bit of work customizing your own WM or going straight terminal. GL :)
 
Well, the laptop is a Toshiba Portoge 3015CDT. It has a 266 mhz P1 chip, not P2, which sucks. AAAAND it only has 64mb RAM. Wow. It has XP on it (no service packs) and it took 5 minutes to boot.

The problem with getting linux on this machine is that the BIOS will only allow boot from HD or PCMCIA CDROM. The PCMCIA CDROM that comes with the computer is missing it's 5v AC Adapter. I tried hooking up an old external DVD drive via USB, but it wouldn't boot. Also, the PC has no NIC or modem.

So, without spending $15 on a 5v AC Adapter from Radio Shack, I can't install anything on this laptop.

Oh and 64MB of RAM!!!! I haven't had this little RAM since around junior high!
 
I also took it apart (which was really easy) and it has a standard 2.5" HD with regular IDE connector.

For some reason, I thought this had a 1.8" HD in it.
 
Does it have a SODIMM slot? Upgrading the RAM would be a huge help for web browsing.
 
I'd get a PCMCIA wireless card to start with...

Also according to Crucial.com your laptop can only handle 96MB RAM maximum. 32MB is soldered onto the motherboard and there is one slot in which there is 32MB currently installed. I think the 96MB maximum is wrong and try installing more.
 
Another snag. I found a 5v adapter that works. The CDROM spins up, ejects and everthing. But, when I plug it's pcmcia slot into the pc, it turns off. Can't eject or anything. So, I think this is a lost cause.

Yes, there is 2 Toshiba 16mb chips soldered on the the logic board. It has 32 more mb in the slot. It's not SD RAM, it's crappy EDO.

I think this PC is just to ancient to recover. Too bad, it's WAY thin and light. But with no way to even get linux on the laptop without spending money, it's not worth it.
 
No, the 96 MB is correct because the largest EDO laptop RAM manufactured was 64 MB, by then they had switched to SD RAM
 
There are some very small PIII notbooks that might be decent for this type of project. Still modern enough to run a small footprint version of linux and be very capable for browsing. You could probably spend about half of what a netbook costs and get one of these on ebay and get it running, upgraded to the max. However, you still have a used laptop and even if the PIII is faster than the Atom, the atom has a faster FSB, utilizes much faster RAM, and most likely a faster hard drive.
 
Those old Porteges are bitches for this kind of thing. Forget booting from anything other than the internal hard drive without your model's specific port replicator. Oh, and the two PIII models I have (3440 and 3480, IIRC) use PC100 MicroDIMMs... Good luck finding those ;)

I was finally able to do a clean install of Windows 2000 by removing the hard drive, copying the W2K CD to the C: drive through another computer, replacing the hard drive, booting to DOS and installing Windows from there. I imagine one could work out something similar using partitions for Linux and the like, but I wouldn't go much beyond that, since hunting down the proper port replicators and RAM types would be far more work and money than this project is worth.
 
I've owned several of those thin Porteges in the past, from the Pentiums to the best they made with the Pentium II 266 in it, and as one poster already said, they're complete bitch machines to work with.

Ubuntu 8.10 is not the OS for that machine, not at all. To be honest, you'll get far greater performance with something like DamnSmallLinux or PuppyLinux, even better would be to install Arch and build it up entirely from scratch (better than LinuxFromScratch, I'd say). It's current, updated frequently, and compiled for i686 already (the Pentiums should work well with that aspect).

The issue is that machine is so old it's limited to about 2MB of video RAM so forget using Compiz - even it can't do miracles. You can get a bigger hard drive in it but you're going to be limited by what the BIOS can see, so don't go thinking you're gonna slap a 320GB 2.5" IDE in there and have it work 'cause it ain't gonna happen (there might be a possibility of using a DDO to get full access but even so, that's another nightmare in itself).

I'd say get it set up with Arch Linux and build it every step of the way. There's a custom KDE release just for Arch that's fairly light on resources, but even then, you have to take a step back and realize you're very limited in what that little tiny Portege is capable of.
 
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