root.veg
04-05-2004, 09:24 AM
Just thought I'd share my sense of achievement at ressurecting an old laptop and making myself a new toy!
I got a Dell Inspiron 7500 donated to me from work, but it had a fatal flaw: it kept cyclicly rebooting whenever you turned it on, and never got as far as the BIOS splash screen. See This Thread (http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=119563) for a description of the problem. The lesson here is, if your machine's a couple of years old, or older, you can bet that someone else has had similar problems to you, you just have to search the web intelligently.
Anyway, I sorted this by copying the relevant bits from that JustLinux thread and sending it, together with a Knoppix CD and a tomsrtbt floppy, to a computer maintenance shop. (My Dad's retired, and I've been working away from home, so I got my Dad to run the errand). I described the problem and said I'd buy as much RAM from him as he could get to work (my definition of "working" was a successful boot from Knoppix!). As an extra incentive, I said I'd buy a power pack, ethernet card and modem off him too, if the RAM worked. Lesson 2 is: don't be ashamed of paying a pro to do work for you! I knew what I wanted, but didn't have the experience, time or money to waste finding out which brand of RAM would work.
Anyway, the computer guy manages to get me 256MB of RAM installed and gets me a power pack. Grand total charge is £170. Now I know that's a lot of money, but consider the hassle it's saved me, and the cost of a new laptop, not to mention the environmental harm of just throwing the poor old Dell away! I reckon if I'd sourced the components myself I could have saved £40 tops (the power pack's expensive), and I wouldn't have been sure that the RAM worked. The lesson for me here is that if you shop local, you might pay more, but you'll get what you want without wading through any corporate crap.
The computer guy, did however, reckon that I stood a better chance sourcing the ethernet and modem cards myself, as he couldn't find any of his suppliers that guaranteed their cards worked with Linux. I think it's one of those commercial things: tons of cards actually do work with Linux, it's just the manufacturers don't make the drivers, so they don't guarantee that the open-source drivers will work.
So, first thing was to decide on a distro. Now normally I'm a Debian zealot, and all three of my boxes run it. However, I considered installing something different (a) for the hell of it, to learn more, (b) to show off, to take Linux on the road and show people how cool it looks, and (c) for easy configuration of laptop hardware, which I have no experience of. I considered Lindows, free on the cover of a magazine, and SuSE, which I would have to buy, as I don't have a CD burner. In the end Fedora Core 1 won, because I had all 3 CDs free from a magazine, and it looks very pretty. I also noticed Eric Raymond's Fedora Multimedia HowTo (http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Fedora-Multimedia-Installation-HOWTO/) which explains how to easily get flash, java and all that stuff sorted specifically for FC1.
The installation process almost doesn't need to be described, it's so easy. One thing I did do, though, was install the developer's tools and kernel source, so I could easily build modules or re-compile a kernel if necessary. Turns out this was necessary to install the modem driver...
The Inspiron 7500 has a lucent winmodem, which it turns out is very well supported by Linux and so I didn't need to get a PCMCIA modem. Excellent. It did, however need a bit of effort. I went to http://www.heby.de/ltmodem and downloaded the correct driver for my distro. The coolest thing about this driver is that you just download and unpack it, run an "rpm -i" command and an install script runs which is sort of a tutorial as well. It stops after every instruction, pausing and waiting for you to press enter so you can read information on what the script is doing. Very useful.
Next up was installing a PCMCIA ethernet card. Browsed the Maplin catalogue (www.maplin.co.uk - it's a UK electronics store with a branch near me) and found a SiteCom ethernet card. Searched the web and found several people who managed to get it working. So I went and bought one at the shop. Typically, the box made no mention of Linux at all, but the driver floppy had a totally unadvertised directory called "Linux", with one file in it: "install.txt". This told me exactly what to add to /etc/pcmcia/config to get cardmgr to recognise the card when I insert it and load up the correct drivers (it uses the 8390.o driver apparently, which is included with the kernel). Pity SiteCom couldn't go to the trouble to print this information *anywhere* on the box, or even in the instruction manual. :rolleyes:
Anyway, erm, that's it. Fedora's network set up GUI let me set up both the modem and network card. Now I can activate whichever one I want depending on where I am.
Now I just have to find an excuse to use the damned thing :)
I got a Dell Inspiron 7500 donated to me from work, but it had a fatal flaw: it kept cyclicly rebooting whenever you turned it on, and never got as far as the BIOS splash screen. See This Thread (http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=119563) for a description of the problem. The lesson here is, if your machine's a couple of years old, or older, you can bet that someone else has had similar problems to you, you just have to search the web intelligently.
Anyway, I sorted this by copying the relevant bits from that JustLinux thread and sending it, together with a Knoppix CD and a tomsrtbt floppy, to a computer maintenance shop. (My Dad's retired, and I've been working away from home, so I got my Dad to run the errand). I described the problem and said I'd buy as much RAM from him as he could get to work (my definition of "working" was a successful boot from Knoppix!). As an extra incentive, I said I'd buy a power pack, ethernet card and modem off him too, if the RAM worked. Lesson 2 is: don't be ashamed of paying a pro to do work for you! I knew what I wanted, but didn't have the experience, time or money to waste finding out which brand of RAM would work.
Anyway, the computer guy manages to get me 256MB of RAM installed and gets me a power pack. Grand total charge is £170. Now I know that's a lot of money, but consider the hassle it's saved me, and the cost of a new laptop, not to mention the environmental harm of just throwing the poor old Dell away! I reckon if I'd sourced the components myself I could have saved £40 tops (the power pack's expensive), and I wouldn't have been sure that the RAM worked. The lesson for me here is that if you shop local, you might pay more, but you'll get what you want without wading through any corporate crap.
The computer guy, did however, reckon that I stood a better chance sourcing the ethernet and modem cards myself, as he couldn't find any of his suppliers that guaranteed their cards worked with Linux. I think it's one of those commercial things: tons of cards actually do work with Linux, it's just the manufacturers don't make the drivers, so they don't guarantee that the open-source drivers will work.
So, first thing was to decide on a distro. Now normally I'm a Debian zealot, and all three of my boxes run it. However, I considered installing something different (a) for the hell of it, to learn more, (b) to show off, to take Linux on the road and show people how cool it looks, and (c) for easy configuration of laptop hardware, which I have no experience of. I considered Lindows, free on the cover of a magazine, and SuSE, which I would have to buy, as I don't have a CD burner. In the end Fedora Core 1 won, because I had all 3 CDs free from a magazine, and it looks very pretty. I also noticed Eric Raymond's Fedora Multimedia HowTo (http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Fedora-Multimedia-Installation-HOWTO/) which explains how to easily get flash, java and all that stuff sorted specifically for FC1.
The installation process almost doesn't need to be described, it's so easy. One thing I did do, though, was install the developer's tools and kernel source, so I could easily build modules or re-compile a kernel if necessary. Turns out this was necessary to install the modem driver...
The Inspiron 7500 has a lucent winmodem, which it turns out is very well supported by Linux and so I didn't need to get a PCMCIA modem. Excellent. It did, however need a bit of effort. I went to http://www.heby.de/ltmodem and downloaded the correct driver for my distro. The coolest thing about this driver is that you just download and unpack it, run an "rpm -i" command and an install script runs which is sort of a tutorial as well. It stops after every instruction, pausing and waiting for you to press enter so you can read information on what the script is doing. Very useful.
Next up was installing a PCMCIA ethernet card. Browsed the Maplin catalogue (www.maplin.co.uk - it's a UK electronics store with a branch near me) and found a SiteCom ethernet card. Searched the web and found several people who managed to get it working. So I went and bought one at the shop. Typically, the box made no mention of Linux at all, but the driver floppy had a totally unadvertised directory called "Linux", with one file in it: "install.txt". This told me exactly what to add to /etc/pcmcia/config to get cardmgr to recognise the card when I insert it and load up the correct drivers (it uses the 8390.o driver apparently, which is included with the kernel). Pity SiteCom couldn't go to the trouble to print this information *anywhere* on the box, or even in the instruction manual. :rolleyes:
Anyway, erm, that's it. Fedora's network set up GUI let me set up both the modem and network card. Now I can activate whichever one I want depending on where I am.
Now I just have to find an excuse to use the damned thing :)