Old hardware brought back to life

[missmoondog]

thank you, lah-ca

[lah-ca]

thank you, lah-ca

You are most welcome.

[Ralph L]

I have an old Toshiba Satellite A215-S4697. I just clean installed Xubuntu 18.04. Now Xubuntu 18.04 hangs on shutdown. Even the live memory stick hangs on shutdown. Shutdown worked fine on Xubuntu 16.04. Also, I get a Machine Check on boot and it says "APIC ERROR" also during boot. I did not get this on 16.04.

The computer also will not resume from a suspend (started by closing the lid), when the lid is opened. Resume worked fine under 14.04 and under 16.04 until some update in the past 6 months or so. I am very suspicious that my problem is caused by an update to make uefi work, since I have an old bios. I tried a lot of suggestions by other people who have had shutdown hangs, but none of them worked for me.

My log is very similar to the one in https://www.queryxchange.com/q/3_108...wn-or-restart/ the last two items being: https://www.queryxchange.com/q/3_108...wn-or-restart/
Code:

Reached target Final Step.
Starting Power-Off...

Anybody else getting shutdown hangs with an old computer, and an old BIOS. Like I said, I think this is caused by the new uefi support code.
Any help is appreciated. I really don't want to go back to Xubuntu 14.04.

Note: This problem (and the "unable to resume with lid opening problem) were solved by installing Kernel 4.4.97 into Xubuntu 18.04 using Uukk from ppa:teejee2008/ppa. Surprisingly, everything seems to run. I tried Kernel 4.4.98 and it fails, so the bug was introduced in Kernel 4.4.98. I'll keep trying new Kernels to see if the problem gets fixed, but for now it looks like I am doomed to running an old kernel forever.

[hk42]

Thanks for this nice topic.
One point that I would like to emphasize in the choice of what to keep alive or revive
is the choice of a mother board with as many extension slots and ports as possible.
So it will allow testing and reviving of various devices like parallel printers, IEE1394
or SCSI devices.
Dual booting with an old version of Windows or even OS2 is a good idea too.

[mörgæs]

Since all Buntus are abandoning 32 bit hardware we have to focus somewhere else. An obvious choice is Debian from which Buntu is derived.

This Thinkpad now runs Debian 10 which can be seen by the command

lsb_release -a

Distributor ID: Debian
Description:    Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye)
Release:        11
Codename:       bullseye

When connected to the internet by wire the installation goes like this:

Download the mini.iso, for example from here. It's a small file, less than 50 MiB.

'Burn' it to a USB stick or CD and boot from the medium.

During install: The root account will not be enabled if one selects an empty password for root. This gives a setup like in Buntu where the first user created has the option to gain temporary root rights using sudo.

Partitioning is easiest if Debian gets permission to do it all by default but it's also possible to install into partitions created in advance. In any case it's best to stay away from LVM for a beginner and just choose normal logical partitions.

At the end a list offering a number of desktop environments is shown. I chose Mate but other options are worth trying, too.

Reboot and you should be ready to go.

The only tweaking I had to do after install was setting swappiness to 10 as described here.

During boot the display goes through a number of garbled spasms but from the login screen onwards everything is fine.

[Artim]

I have antiX running on a reeeeeally old 32-bit Dell with 512 RAM. Based on Debian and systemd-free, it's plenty nimble and quick, even with Xfce added.

[jago25_98]

Question: If I boost RAM up to 4GB will it really be any faster?

My laptop:
2GB RAM, 64bit 2x2.16ghz, XFCE. 160gb IDE HDD.




To be honest...
I don't have the motivation to do much work on this.
I'd prefer to just be able to access a cloud instance to browse. Is there a cloud instance available without needing to setup remote GUI access rather than just ssh?

After losing half my weekend I couldn't get any of these to work with the Azure trial and Xbuntu image: VNC, x11rdp, Teamviewer, ChromeRemoteDesktop

[uRock]

Question: If I boost RAM up to 4GB will it really be any faster?

My laptop:
2GB RAM, 64bit 2x2.16ghz, XFCE. 160gb IDE HDD.




To be honest...
I don't have the motivation to do much work on this.
I'd prefer to just be able to access a cloud instance to browse. Is there a cloud instance available without needing to setup remote GUI access rather than just ssh?

After losing half my weekend I couldn't get any of these to work with the Azure trial and Xbuntu image: VNC, x11rdp, Teamviewer, ChromeRemoteDesktop

You may want to start a support thread.

[mörgæs]

For the questions regarding memory you are welcome to ask here. Please begin with posting the results from the memory related commands in initial post.

Questions regarding cloud are better off in another thread.

[j2ee]

Ubuntu related distros will not support 32 bits, Debian is the only choice for major distros.