Give me a laptop

mbro wrote: BARREL BREAK wrote: High Voltage wrote: i can find the battery online possibly. let me look around, it may be about $100 for a replacement. Even if you can't find the battery, I could probably use it just plugged in various places. Isn't linux great, you can make a crappy old machine useful again with modern convienences. Just throw damn small on there, apt-get abiword and bamb, homework machine

That actually might not be so simple. If you read HV's description, this particular machine don't have no CD drive, and I'm betting no NIC either.
How would you even get linux on it?

Hm.. I would keep the macintosh on there, but thats just me.

choopie911 wrote: It's os 9. I hate os 9,and its slow

I don't know if any decent distro works on PPC chips...

WGP guy2 wrote: I have one I could possibly give you. It has windows 95 on it now, it was made in like 95. I have no idea who made it, it has 2 batteries both which don't work at all. It only has a floppy drive, a serial port, and a phone jack. It is so old it has one of the ball mouses built into it beside the screen with the left and right buttons behind the screen.

pics...that thing sounds confusing

BARREL BREAK wrote: mbro wrote: BARREL BREAK wrote: High Voltage wrote: i can find the battery online possibly. let me look around, it may be about $100 for a replacement. Even if you can't find the battery, I could probably use it just plugged in various places. Isn't linux great, you can make a crappy old machine useful again with modern convienences. Just throw damn small on there, apt-get abiword and bamb, homework machine That actually might not be so simple. If you read HV's description, this particular machine don't have no CD drive, and I'm betting no NIC either. How would you even get linux on it?

Well first of all, I'm going to assume that it has a floppy drive and that it has a nic, if it doesn't have a nic (which I doubt, but it is possible (my comp from 93 did have a nic) you can still get a pcmia nic card) All you have to do is make a boot floppy which will boot a small generic kernel onto it and will then allow you to install a distro on it. The damn small forums (i'm going to guess on linuxquestions) would be more help, or the debian forums. Think of it as a learning experience. A challenge. A time to grow.

choopie911 wrote: mbro, I should put linux on my old powerbook. Take anything important off and leet it out.

Eh, why not. If you've got the extra laptop and you don't use it much why wouldn't you have fun with it? I don't know the specs on it but you might want to go with powerbook xubuntu if your specs aren't that great. Otherwise plain old ubuntu would be great. It'll give you the chance to experience a new OS with new apps. You'll finally be able to see the greatness that is amaroK (music playing program, a linux killer app) and use true customizability for the first time in your life. However you don't have to just install ubuntu because that's what everyone else is doing. There are plenty of other linux distros out there that are also very good. I just recommend ubuntu because out of the many distrobutions I've tried it has been the best experience for me.

BARREL BREAK wrote: choopie911 wrote: It's os 9. I hate os 9,and its slow I don't know if any decent distro works on PPC chips...

There are plenty. Yellow Dog is the original distro for PPC chips but it's based on Slackware . Ubuntu has a PPC version as well as most of the other mainstream distros. It used to be the case where it was hard to find but lately the PPC version of the kernel has been doing just fine.

BARREL BREAK wrote: mbro - you truely are a wealth of information, aren't you?

A small countries wealth, yes.

My workplace has some HP Omnibook 4150's we're donating. They don't have NICs but they do have PCMCIA slots. I think they're 450MHz/128MB. Let me know if you're interested.

mbro nailed it, the laptop has a pcmcia nic card. it's an x-jack pop out thing.

well, kinda take that back, it's a fax modem card. but yeah, you can pic up a pcmcia nic card for cheap.