Tardis Mk III will be a Linux box....

[poltr1]

Some time ago, I mentioned that I had dibs on an old Pentium III laptop at work. Earlier this week, we cleaned out two cubicles in preparation for new employees, and a lot of old and unused computer things were thrown out. One of the "things" was an old Gateway E4000 desktop, which I was using until last year, when the hard drive started to fail on it. I managed to vulch that machine, along with some mice, a power cord, a modem, and some phone and network cables. And Jeanne (our admin assistant) said that I could have the laptop.

And so, I took it home on Thursday night.

While cleaning out the carrying case, I came across a copy of Windows NT Workstation 4.0, Service Pack 5, and some old manuals. But that's not what I'm going to install on the laptop. Once I get a hard drive for it, I'm installing Ubuntu 7.10. I've already ran it from the laptop's CD-ROM, and it appears to work nicely. Especially the games. I'll just need to know how to install new hardware, when it comes time to do so -- floppy drive module, modem, network card, wireless network card, USB devices, etc.

For the Linux geeks out there -- and I really should make a filter -- how easy or difficult would it be to install these devices? I'm not expecting plug-and-play, which is one of Windows' main selling points (ease of use). Are drivers available?

Oh yeah. If you want to be included in my Linux filter, post a reply to this message. I'm already planning to include autographedcat, bikergeek, and urban_terrorist.

Comments

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

Me please?

[fuzzyvanman.livejournal.com]

Me too.

On drivers, the wireless should be the toughest to get working. I would expect most other things to just work. Maybe not the modem, if it's a winmodem.

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

Wireless works great with ubuntu, as long as you're careful to shop for the right ones. The card makers don't make this easy, though. :/

[poltr1]

I hope I have one of the good ones. It's a Linksys (forgot the model number) wireless card. It's 802.11g compatible.

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

The important thing is the chipset, and that's highly variable not only from model to model, but even between versions of the same model!

If you send me the model number and revision number, I can do some research. I found some back when I was looking for a linux-compatible card. (And I found one which I currently have no real use for, so if yours doesn't work, let me know and I'll see about getting you the one I have here somewhere.

[poltr1]

The card is a Linksys Wireless-G, model WPC54G, version 2.

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

Looks like it's not natively compatable but some people managed to make it work. Take a look at this thread:

http://ubuntuforums.org/printthread.php?t=5645.

(And of course, that's a couiple of years old, so things may have gotten better since then.)

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

Ubuntu should work nearly flawlessly out of the box with hardware of that vintage. The nice thing about "gently used" gear is that it tends to have far fewer driver issues than state of the art hardware. Most of the bugs will have long since been worked out of them.

Great find, enjoy!