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

[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!