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mac-christian
February 3rd, 2010, 11:48 PM
Hi all

I tried to installed Ubuntu 9.10 on an older Sony Vaio laptop (model PCG-XG9) with 20 GB HD and 128 or 256 MB RAM (not sure). There is no ethernet port, but I have a PCMCIA WLAN card "Cabetron RoamAbout 11 Mbit/s, which should work perfectly with any Linux.

The computer had Win98 on it originally (which, of course, after all installation attempts is now destroyed). The problem is that I cannot install to the end at all - no matter what I try:

1) Having the disk as a single FAT partition (made by a Win98 installation CD), it appears that Ubuntu cannot create the correct partitions needed for Linux.

2) Having deleted the DOS partition with FDISK from Windows98 - which is like buying a completely new, unformatted HD from a store - the installer just stops and does not do anything.

Is there a manual / instruction page somewhere how I should partition the disk manually (how to do it, and what sizes are recommended for each partition)? I do _not_ want to have any Windows partition left, if not absolutely necessary.

This would be great. Thank you, Christian

audiomick
February 4th, 2010, 12:48 AM
I think your problem is not enough RAM


A Pentium 4, 1GHz system is the minimum recommended for a desktop system.
Table 3.2. Recommended Minimum System Requirements
Install Type RAM (minimal) RAM (recommended) Hard Drive No desktop 64 megabytes 256 megabytes 1 gigabyte With Desktop 64 megabytes 512 megabytes 5 gigabytes



from here
https://help.ubuntu.com/9.10/installation-guide/i386/minimum-hardware-reqts.html

I am not really up on which variations are really lightweight systems, but you could look at xubuntu.
http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/xubuntu

mac-christian
February 4th, 2010, 09:42 AM
Thank you, Michael. I'll try to see whether I find some more RAM in the attic, or give Xubuntu a try.

Christian