An Ubuntu adventure in prehistoric times
Ubuntu, as I had assumed,would appear to be more lightweight than a Microsoft counterpart (as in being less bloated; potentially much less demanding on hardware). Eager to take Ubuntu for a spin on a less powerful machine, I got the opportunity to install the much-hyped distribution on a Compaq Armada 3500. The purpose of this post is to help the poor people having to go through what I have been through!
The laptop i configured as such:
- Pentium II 350 MHz
- 128 MB EDO-RAM (EDO!)
- 6 GB hard drive
- Chips F69000 Video card
- ES1869 Sound system
- 8X speed CD-ROM drive
- D-Link DWL-650+ PCMCIA card
- 3COM 10BaseT ethernet PCMCIA adaptor
Eager to boot the live CD, I watched the spinning poppy-seed bagel for around 30 mins after X windows initialized. I realized that there might not be enough memory to contain the live CD, so I scoured the net to find a distribution with a smaller footprint. My instincts lead me to something running XFCE and lo and behold, I found Xubuntu.
Seeing the memory requirements were 128MB, I happily downloaded the iso and I was back in the business. Or so I thought… Taking 10 mins to log on the live CD and 3 mins for each installation step at the minimum, (and also locking up each time at step 5 of 6), I grew really tired of trying (I tried at least 3 times!). I then realized 128MB was not enough despite the published requirements.
Enter Xubuntu – alternative installer. It is the text-only installer for Xubuntu. This made installation a snap. After happily booting into XFCE, I noticed X.org was not running XFCE at the correct resolution and did not want to change no matter what (running at 800×600 vs 1024×768. On an LCD this is extremely annoying). The sound card was not working and the wireless network card wasn’t connecting either. The only redeeming factor was that the ethernet adaptor was working flawlessly.
Keep in mind that I’m installing Ubuntu on older hardware. Recent hardware doesn’t have these problems.
Coming soon: The next post will explain how to fix the problems.
Monday, July 10th, 2006 @ 1:37 am 
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July 10th, 2006 at 3:09 am
I have installed Ubuntu on my Compaq Armada E500 some while back and everything worked out fine. Except that I didn’t like the package manager – which kept forgetting the dependencies and adding more than needed when re-configured.
Anyway, the most adapted dsitro for this kind of hardware definitely has to be DSL (Damn Small Linux). The speed drastically improved on my laptop. And it can be configured as a debian system too after a hard disk install.
July 10th, 2006 at 10:33 am
I installed Ubuntu on a P2 last year (I did have some trouble getting the sound to work at first) but its been a year since that server has been up with very low maintence.
I do my apt-get updates/upgrades once a month or so and I’ve never had a problem.
July 10th, 2006 at 5:50 pm
yeah i checked out DSL, but I needed something easy for other people than me to use it. I remember having a pentium 2 450 a few years ago, it didn’t seem as slow!
in any case, it nice to be running xterms & emacs on this ‘puter as opposed to winBlows2000; i can get some work done while i’m not in Toronto!
July 11th, 2006 at 3:02 am
Yes, I agree; Emacs is a good OS. Too bad it doesn’t have an editor. ;D
January 21st, 2007 at 12:46 pm
Hi there,
could you maybe explain how you got your F69000 to display 1024×768 in X? Because I currently have the exact same problem on my living-room-music-box-mini-PC, and have yet to find a cure
Thanks,
Jore
January 22nd, 2007 at 6:53 am
Change your Xorg settings to 16-bit colors or lower at 1024×768. 24-bit color is not supported.
That should do the trick =)