£46 Laptop

[tuxsheadache]

I stumbled across this £46 laptop (including P&P):

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=130384943952#description

Do you think you could install Ubuntu or another distro of Linux on this little machine? Windows CE 5.0 seems a bit basic to me... Would a distro like puppy linux be better?

If so, could be a fun for £46!

[snowpine]

There is absolutely zero chance Ubuntu will run on that, sorry. Check out the Ubuntu system requirements:


# 1 GHz x86 processor
# 1 Gb of system memory (RAM)
# 15 GB of hard-drive space (although this can be split onto 2 drives, a 5Gb / and a 10Gb /home fairly easily)
# Graphics card and monitor capable of 1024 by 768

Puppy might be worth a try, I guess, but you might run into 2 potential problems: 1) does Puppy support the ARM processor? 2) Does this "netbook" have an actual drive, or is Windows CE burned to ROM?

Just because something is cheap does not mean it is a good investment. ;)

[howefield]

Do you think you could install Ubuntu

Nope.


or another distro of Linux on this little machine?

Yes, but the specs are so low, I'm not sure fun would be the word ;-) Think I'd try Slitaz.

You'll can find specifications for most distros on their webpage.

[tudor117]

You could probably go and install Lubuntu, Puppy or something really lightweight. Though it isn't very powerful and has a ARM CPU with only 128M RAM.

Maybe you could use it for surfing web and maybe some other simple tasks.

Though I like the price :D

EDIT: Ouch the harddrive is flash, and only 2GB of it. Not much to do there.

[tuxsheadache]

Looks like I had best start looking for ARM processor based distros!

[snowpine]

I'll repeat my warning from post #2: These "computers" hitting the market are basically Palm Pilots in a netbook form factor. Replacing the preinstalled Windows CE with Linux is not a beginner project.

Here's a thread with lots of discussion of these devices: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1349626

[init1]

I wouldn't recommend it. Even if Linux will run on the processor, I doubt you'd be able to boot from USB to install it. I'm sure it's possible, but it'd probably take a lot if work. I had one briefly. It stopped booting after a few uses. I returned it and got a real netbook with a x86 processor.