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View Full Version : What is the old laptop you have successfully installed ubuntu on?



prince_alfie
May 18th, 2007, 09:06 PM
What is the oldest that you have installed the following flavors of unbuntu on?

1) Ubuntu/GNOME
2) Kubuntu
3) Xubuntu
4) Fluxubuntu?

thanks guys for your input? :)

mvaniersel
May 18th, 2007, 09:12 PM
This one isn't that old, but to start this thread off:

I've got ubuntu 7.04 running just fine on my HP pavilion ze4240. It's 3.5 years old, but I've upgraded it to 500 Mb RAM and a 80 Gb HDD.

I never thought a laptop that old would be able to handle Compiz. But I gave it a try and surprisingly, it does run very well, cube and wobbly windows and all.

Too bad it's starting to show signs of its age. The sockets for the AC adapter and the headphones are getting bad, and don't make contact half the time. Plus the battery is bad. Other than that, ubuntu is keeping it alive way past its expiration date.

I'm sure somebody can come up with a laptop older than this one.

mujalan
May 18th, 2007, 09:58 PM
At this moment I am trying to get 7.04 on an IBM Thinkpad 390, so far unsuccessfully. That machine is probably about 5 yrs old. I do have it going quite well on a Toshiba S305. No problems I know of there. The Toshiba is about 3 yrs old.

screaminj3sus
May 18th, 2007, 11:00 PM
I've isntalled Ubuntu with gnome on my friends rather old old Inspiron 1100 (Thing is frickin huge), it had 768 MB of RAM, a 40 GB HDD an SiS chipset and a 1.4 Ghz Celeron mobile I believe. Both gnome nad KDE ran fine on it.

daschmidty
May 19th, 2007, 06:39 AM
So far kubuntu 7.04 runs with little or no trouble on my thinkpad x24 with an 1133 mhz p3 and 640MB of RAM. It's surprisingly quick as well.

DerArzt
May 19th, 2007, 07:13 AM
I put fluxbox, then xubuntu on a celeron II, 64MB RAM ,12 GB Harddrive laptop. Fluxbox runs smoothly but i wasnt too big of a fan of the UI. Xubuntu runs a bit slow, but definitely usable. Performs about on par with Win98SE on same system. Fortunately I was able to get another 64MBs of the blazingly fast PC100 RAM it has (lol) on ebay for a whopping $4 shipped. Cant wait to get it :) Never heard of fluxubuntu untill now, guess I will look into it.

mi_were
May 19th, 2007, 08:12 AM
Toshiba Satellite 335CDT 64MB RAM 6GB harddisk and the laptop is OLD! Dapper 6.06 runs fine but Blackbox is better.

gm0t0
May 19th, 2007, 08:51 AM
Specs: Sony VAIO PCG FX-370 / Intel Mobile PIII 1.0ghz / *60gb hdd / 256mb ram. *the original hdd was hosed so i picked up a new hdd and just made a dual boot (xp/ubuntu studio 7.04). i've seen reviews on this lappy as far back as 2001, that would make it almost 7yrs. old?!:)

barely 24hrs. old, i have Ubuntu Studio 7.04 running on a lappy a friend was gonna throw away, this OS rawks! i haven't had/needed to boot into xp yet hee-hee, l8r

g

su99
May 19th, 2007, 09:12 AM
ibm thinkpad 600e, pen-ii 333mhz (or 366, can't remember. doesn't matter), 384mb ram. some netgear 11mbps wifi pc card.

runs ubuntu 7.04 well. a bit slow when launching large apps like firefox. but usable. audio only works sometimes but i don't need it anyways. all other hardware runs perfectly with built-in driver of ubuntu.

must manually add "acpi=force" in the boot parameter to suspend upon lid close. otherwise acpi automatically turns off on startup because it finds the bios year < 2000.

Martin
May 19th, 2007, 11:36 AM
I've got an old IBM Thinkpad T23. 1Ghz. 384Mb RAM 1024*768 Savage Video etc.Cisco Aironet WiFi PCMCIA card. It's about 5 years old. My partner uses it for a uni course she's doing. I loaded Ubuntu 7.04 onto it and have been amazed at how well it works. It's great.

ugm6hr
May 19th, 2007, 01:12 PM
Xubuntu7.04 on a Dell5000e (now about 8 years old). PIII 700MHz 256MB RAM, 10GB HD, dual boot with XP, straight off the LiveCD. Haven't tried the power saving / suspend stuff yet. Or the internal modem.

Main problem was getting the slightly unusual screen to work - searching here helped with a bit of trial and error (my xorg.conf attached as a .doc for anyone else struggling). The screen is 1400x1050 with bizarre refresh frequency, so the screen defaults to having it split and mirrored half-way across - totally unusable. Sorted that, got the Touchpad sorted. Still struggling with the old Dlink DWL-610 PCMCIA wireless card (might need to invest in something newer).

Have had PuppyLinux2.14 on it before, which also worked OK (albeit with display issues too). I think Puppy was a bit quicker, but Xubuntu has a more friendly feel to it for beginners (because of the lack of root login).

EDIT: The DWL-610 works with ndiswrapper with the XP Dlnk driver with WEP (but not WPA in Ubuntu - not sure why)

gn2
May 19th, 2007, 01:21 PM
I've got Xubuntu 7.04 installed on a second-hand Toshiba Portege 3440CT, P3 500, 192mbRAM, 40gHDD. I think it's seven or eight years old.

Had to use "alternate" CD to install, but runs very well, much better than W2kProSP4 which it dual-boots with.

W2kProSP4 takes a full 5minutes to boot to a useable desktop, Xubuntu takes 1min30secs.

Apps open faster in Xubuntu than W2kProSP4, and the DWL650+ wireless card performs much better too.

With Xubuntu it's at least as fast in general use as a friends brand new Vista Celeron equipped laptop.

Chetamonye
May 20th, 2007, 06:10 AM
ibm thinkpad 600e, pen-ii 333mhz (or 366, can't remember. doesn't matter), 384mb ram. some netgear 11mbps wifi pc card.

runs ubuntu 7.04 well. a bit slow when launching large apps like firefox. but usable. audio only works sometimes but i don't need it anyways. all other hardware runs perfectly with built-in driver of ubuntu.

must manually add "acpi=force" in the boot parameter to suspend upon lid close. otherwise acpi automatically turns off on startup because it finds the bios year < 2000.

I'm also running a 600E. Installed Xubuntu 7.04, but I use Fluxbox. Xubuntu was too sluggish. Firefox 2 is a dog. 1,5 was quicker. Also using a netgear card.

Chet

jbiskupiak
May 20th, 2007, 11:31 AM
Ubuntu installed on a IBM Thinkpad 600X (PIII, 500 Mhz, 768 MB RAM). This TP is 8 years old. All the standard software works fine.

borahshadow
May 20th, 2007, 04:26 PM
well I have not put ubuntu on it but I have debian with fluxbox on an old Micron Transport XPE probably almost 10years old or older now. I think it has a full 32MB ram and I'm not sure what the harddrive on it is someday mabey I'll try xubuntu or fluxbuntu but it is so old that it realy is not useable for anything (at least for me) I think the cpu is somewhere is the 200mhz range I should check but I don't have time right now

bukwirm
May 20th, 2007, 05:01 PM
It's not a laptop, but...

My 11 or 12 year old Packard Bell Legend 3540 with a 100MHz Pentium, 48MB RAM, and a 900MB hard drive runs Debian with no X Windows pretty well. It is currently serving as a webserver and fileserver (with Apache2, nfs-server and ssh-server installed).

regomodo
May 22nd, 2007, 12:57 AM
IBM Thinkpad 570E. It's 7/8yrs old. I've added 256MB of ram

I'm using Ubuntu 7.04 with Gnome and it aint bad. I tried Xubuntu for a while but found minimal speed improvement.

Can't undock/dock it and thats the only issue with it although i can't see my network shares despite being able to in xubuntu/thunar/fusesmb

EDIT: i had to change default bit depth from 24 to 16 otherwise X was very laggy/unusable

prince_alfie
May 22nd, 2007, 05:36 PM
I just completed an install using the regular Ubuntu 7.04 PowerPC build (Feisty Fawn) onto my 300mhz Tangerine iBook :popcorn: with 192 MB of RAM. Yes, it's from 1999, that ole laptop.

It took awhile to install but it worked finally. And it's not too sluggish in fact although snappiness would be increased if I could add a 512 MB RAM chip into it.

So old machines aren't unusable by any means :)

satellite360
May 27th, 2007, 04:56 AM
I'm running Xubuntu an a 6 year old Dell Inspiron 8000 (PIII 850MHz, 512Mb RAM). Used to run Ubuntu on it without any problems but have found Xubuntu quicker.

snafu_az
May 27th, 2007, 06:18 AM
I have installed Ubuntu 7.04 (Fiesty Fawn) on a 2001 Compaq Presario 17xl575

CPU: Pentium 3M 800mhz
Ram: 256mb
HD: 40gb

I had to use the alternative CD for the installation. I also compiled a new DSDT.aml otherwise the ACPI will not funtion at all.

cajan
May 27th, 2007, 06:40 AM
Thinkpad 600x PIII500, 576ram, 60g HD, dual boot with W2K, has both 7.04 and 6.10 plus VMs in both. Wireless g PC card. Very happy with performance and most impressed with 7.04 Reasonable speed

Stickee
May 28th, 2007, 01:04 AM
Not sure how old this laptop was, but I got Fluxbuntu working on a Pentium II, 266MHz, 64MB of RAM, 5GB HDD. It's pretty useful for just surfing the web, checking email, etc.

jinkazi
May 29th, 2007, 05:35 AM
Guess I just got stupid-lucky trying Feisty on my HP ze4930US. Everything works flawlessly and I
have the wobblies, 3D desktop and all the apps I like to use working like second nature.

This is the best Linux I've used. Amazing array of included programs and after updates, plugin add-ins, the VLC media player and Second Life I've got a system that makes me not miss Windows at all.

prince_alfie
May 30th, 2007, 03:29 AM
Right now I'm trying to install Feisty onto a 233mhz PII Solis 280m (which is a mini laptop with 9") and there is only 32mb of ram... we will see how things go with that one!

dmstone
May 30th, 2007, 03:46 AM
I have Feisty running on a Panasonic Toughbook CF-72 pentimum 4.

bimmerd00d
May 31st, 2007, 12:40 AM
Toshiba Sat Pro 4600

*P3 900mhz
*256mb PC100
*40GB
*802.11b Toshiba Orinoco card
*Trident CyberbladeXP

Running Ubuntu CE 7.04, gave it to my g/f's father for father's day/birthday and he absolutely loves it. It dual boots a modified XP Pro, but i think he's use XP maybe once since I gave it to him last month. I also have Ubuntu 7.04 on my g/f's not so old Inspiron 2200, both run flawlessly.


Dell Inspiron 2200

*Celeron 1.4Ghz with scaling!
*768mb DDR2100
*80GB 5400rpm
*Intel 915
*Intel 2200BG

Aerugo
May 31st, 2007, 02:58 PM
I've installed ubuntu, fluxbuntu and xubuntu, all feisty, on an IBM A22m thinkpad. Nothing older than that though. Gnome is really slow on that system though, so I usually run fluxbox as wm.

prince_alfie
May 31st, 2007, 04:00 PM
Right now I'm trying to install Feisty onto a 233mhz PII Solis 280m (which is a mini laptop with 9") and there is only 32mb of ram... we will see how things go with that one!

Still working on this one... after 2 days... trying xubuntu alternate now.

cywhale
May 31st, 2007, 04:20 PM
Toshiba Satellite 3000-514, 1Ghz Pentium III mobile, 512Mb RAM, 40Gb HD, GeForce2Go 16Mb
Ubuntu 7.04 runs very well, suspend, hibernate, resume, wireless using a Atheros-based PCMCIA card, even Compiz works - not very useful because of the old GeForce but it works.

edemark
June 3rd, 2007, 08:10 PM
Xubuntu 6.10 runs perfectly on my compaq presario 1825 (p2 365 Mhz 128Mb ram 6G hd)

rac56
June 6th, 2007, 02:50 AM
Thinkpad T23, 1ghz PIII, 1gb memory, Savage 16mb video, Atmel wireless adapter. I think the box is about 5 years old. I am running Ubuntu 7.04. It really runs quite well, very responsive. I bought it refurbished to learn Linux and it's become my primary system. I rarely fire up the Windows desktop anymore.

Stelakis1
June 6th, 2007, 09:38 AM
Siemens-Nixdorf 700, PII 300Hz, 192Mb ram, 10Gb HD, Year 1998.
Ubuntu Breazy server install + Ubuntu Lite
It gave life to a laptop I had forgoten

chrisUK1
June 6th, 2007, 10:08 AM
Recently loaded Feisty onto my old IBMx20

P3 600mhz
256mb RAM
20gb HD (painfully slow!)
4mb graphics (yes that's right 4mb!)
No CDROM (did a network boot)

I'm surprised how well it worked without any tweaking. All the hot keys worked (they didn't with Dapper ) and the hardware is well detected. Haven't tried the modem, but ethernet works fine. Natually I didn't bother with 3d effects as the X20s 4 mb vid card is not upto it.

The only disappointment is that XP pro with SP2 actually runs faster on this machine (albeit i've modded XPs configuration considerably).

casals
June 7th, 2007, 03:41 AM
Xubuntu, Feisty (7.04) on IBM Thinkpad 600X (PIII, 500 Mhz, 192 MB RAM), 12G HD, Linksys WPC 54G v2. (This machine was built in 1999.)

Works beautifully. Just installed Freetype (http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Feisty#How_to_improve_sub-pixel_font_rendering_for_Feisty), screen looks great. Adobe Reader. emacs. TeXLive. Open Office.

No pain at all to get it to print using Windows printing via Samba (printing to printer connected to a Windows machine through the wifi card) --- getting a MacBook to do the same took months.

The wifi card "just worked". Go to Applications > System > Network, you'll see the wifi connection; tell it what you want to connect to and it works. This is huge -- this card was a problem even for Linksys's drivers; certainly not easy on Linux even last year.

Amazing.

Wherdgo
June 7th, 2007, 05:48 PM
Toshibe Portege 7140CT; 500Mhz PIII Coppermine, 320MB RAM, 6GB HDD, Trident Cyber Blade e4-128 AGP, w/ Network/ DVD Dock

esavato
June 7th, 2007, 07:00 PM
I have Ubuntu 6.04 loaded on a Sony Vaio PCGFX-370 with a Linksys wireless card that uses the BCM4318 chipset. It has 256 MB ram and a 40G hard drive.

snakeye
June 24th, 2007, 03:47 PM
It has 256MB of RAM. I've installed kubuntu and it works perfect!

W. Irving
July 17th, 2007, 12:07 AM
IBM Thinkpad 380.

Set up Ubuntu 6.10 with IceWM. Very nice.

Had been ever more so had been faster than Windows 95.....

pearlie
July 23rd, 2007, 04:06 PM
Thinkpad A20m - P3, 1999 vintage, purchased for $15. Running Feisty; I souped it up with 256M ($25 worth) of RAM and a used 60G HD I had lying around, and added a Belkin wireless dongle ($40). It's astonishingly snappy. My aged mum can now sit in her front porch rocker and surf - she's no longer confined to her kitchen computer and she's running wild.

chicoperico
July 23rd, 2007, 09:03 PM
hello all,

well i recently got feisty fawn installed on a toshiba satellite 210cs, 120MHz, 48MB RAM.
the really interesting bit was that the machine can't boot from cdrom, does not have usb and the floppy drive was broken. that took a lot of net-searching.

as it is intended to work as a server, i did not bother tinkering with the graphics.

i use a nullmodem cable for network access.

as i recently posted on this forum, my problem now is getting the pcmcia slot to work with my gigaexpress network card - pccardctrl sees the two slots, but does not recognise the card.

does anybody have any idea, how to remedy this?

good bye!
Rainer

izizzle
July 23rd, 2007, 11:32 PM
Dell Inspiron 2100. 700 MHZ 256 RAM. I installed xubuntu and ubuntu successfully.

#Reistlehr-
July 24th, 2007, 01:40 AM
Dell Lattitude 4000? i think. It came stock with windows 2k, so it's about 5 years old maybe 6. Ubuntu. No wirless onboard. WOrked good, untill the **** hit the fan.

w4ett
July 24th, 2007, 01:45 AM
Fluxbuntu on CTX 700 lappy 300 Mhz AMD K-6 (originally came with Win 98 )

mike.desmo
December 5th, 2007, 03:15 AM
Installed xubuntu fiesty on a IBM X20, 500 mhz, 320 meg ram, linksys pcmcia card 802 g;
also on two CF-72, 850 mhz, with 320 meg ram, the same linksys card;
All run very well, with excellent screen display and very reasonable performance.
This program is excellent for extending the life of older machines and saving people $$$$$$$$
The IBM weighs less than 3 lbs., the screen resolution is as good as any new machine at the 1024 setting and is amazingly considering the hardware.

raul_
December 5th, 2007, 03:17 AM
8 year old Toshiba Satellite. 333Mhz , 128MB RAM. It has those magnificent modern stickers saying "DESIGNED FOR WINDOWS 98 SUCCUMB MERE MORTAL!!"

Feisty server plus E17,XFCE, Fluxbox on top.

Eventually I installed Arch ;) it still works, I just got a new laptop...which is running Arch :o

PaganHippie
December 5th, 2007, 03:45 AM
1998(?) Olivetti ECHOS 200SM, 200MHz Pentium MMX, 64MB RAM, 2GB HDD, CD-ROM. Came to me with Win95 on it. Shoehorned Xubuntu 6.06.1 into it. Slow, but it does run.

lonniehenry
December 5th, 2007, 04:45 AM
My year old laptop is out being repaired and I picked up my sons 3.5 year old hp ze4805 and installed gutsy on it. he stopped using it because it overheated. With Gutsy it runs like a top. I was able to get to do all the eyecandy and wireless working with no problem. The overheating problem seems to handled by the powermanagement.

edd07
December 5th, 2007, 04:51 AM
I've installed both Ubuntu and Xubuntu on a Clamshell iBook G3 with 256MB RAM and 3GB of disk space. It originally came with Mac OS 9, and was too old to run OSX. Gnome was almost unusable, but Xfce ran pretty well, even with the compositor enabled. Firefox was pretty slow, though.

I upgraded it from Edgy to Feisty, but I had to do a clean, CD install because the hard drive wasn't big enough to download the updates :D

sugarland2k
December 5th, 2007, 04:35 PM
My latest laptop..
Panasonic CF-72 Toughbook - Pentium 4 Mobile, 1.6GHz, 768Mb, 60GB HDD. Running Kubuntu (kde) & Ubuntu-7.10 (gnome) very well ! I also ran Kubuntu 7.04 on my CF-72 at 700Mhz pretty well.

I love Toughbooks and Ubuntu runs well on them! Makes them even tougher!

Thanks to all!

MoToR
December 11th, 2007, 11:38 AM
IBM ThinkPad X20 Type 2662-36G in its initial configuration: PIII 600MHz, 128MB RAM, 20GB HDD.
Ubuntu 7.10. It's my first Linux, but as far as I can see - it works like a charm.

Tried to install using regular desktop i386 CD, but gave up after ~3hrs of constant CD reading ang bright brown screen (long after the mouse cursosr appearance and crackling welcome sound).
Then I realized that I have less than 196MB of RAM and followed the instruction to install using alternate CD. Which worked flawlessly :wink:.

Milambar
December 12th, 2007, 01:34 AM
IBM Thinkpad 570, with 128MB RAM and 4GB hard disk, connectivity supplied by a Netgear 511T PCMCIA card.

I managed to shoehorn Xubuntu onto it, then kicked off all the XFCE stuff, and replaced it with fluxbox. XFCE is nice, but even that was too heavy for such a weak machine.

After a bit of tweaking, fluxbox runs nice on it. Although it will take a little getting used to, after using Gnome on my main machine for so long.

The Netgear 511T card was supported "out of the box" by the Atheros drivers, but the applet couldn't set the key up properly, I had to configure it manually with:

iwconfig ath0 essid XXXXX
iwconfig ath0 mode Managed
iwconfig ath0 key open xxxxxxxxxxxx
dhclient ath0

Other than missing sound, everything works.

christhemonkey
December 12th, 2007, 01:51 AM
Compaq armada E500.

Installed ubuntu, 800mhz pentium 3, 192mb ram, 8gb hd.

Although, admittedly found it a little (!) slow so in the end installed openbox and run that normally now.


And also another laptop, unbranded, about 8 years old,
think it had 128mb ram, 5gb hd and a 600mhz pentium2? Something like that!
Has full ubuntu installed and running on it.