How I Am Using Linux On A 13 Years Old Laptop

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This is an old article from the archives of It’s FOSS. I am making some structural changes and thus decided to move this story shared by Roy Davies here.

At the end of 2013, I retrieved my old 2002 vintage Acer TravelMate 2420 laptop back from my grandson. He had had it since 2007 when I had replaced it with an Acer Aspire 5735. I swapped it back for a brand new Apple Mac Book Air, as he needed something newer and faster for his college work.

In brief, the Acer TravelMate 2420 is a 14” laptop with Intel Celeron M CPU, 512mb of memory, and a 40gb hard drive. Good basic spec with all the usual connections, and a DVD-RW as standard. I upgraded the memory to 2gb, the most it could support. It was purchased pre-installed with Windows XP Home Premium.

OK. I had an old laptop, a bit battered with cracks around the hinges, but it still worked. I cleaned it out and re-installed XP. At about that time, Microsoft confirmed that they would be pulling the plug on updates and support for XP on 14th February 2014. So I thought to keep it as a spare.

[irp]

Then, in February and March 2014, Computer Active magazine ran a series of articles, ‘Windows XP Survival Guide’. Parts 4 and 5 were ‘Switching to Linux‘ and ‘Make Linux more like Windows’. With nothing to lose, I bit the bullet and so started my Linux journey, and the introduction to ‘Free & Open Source Software’.

Following the articles, I installed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, then the Xubuntu XFCE desktop, and finally installed the ‘Windows 7 theme’. It looked good and had the familiar look and feel of the Windows 7 that I was used to on my second laptop.

Then, I found Distrowatch.com. This opened up a whole new world of opportunities. Looking at the Distrowatch ‘hits’ list, I decided to try Linux Mint 15. What a delight, the familiar look with none of the hassle, nor any cost. It took a while to come to terms with ‘the terminal’, but I had the time. Finally, along came ‘It’s FOSS‘ with news, tips, and tricks to help me understand what Linux is all about and to give support and information about what others are using Linux for in this great world we live in.

Over the last 18 months, I have installed a number of Linux distros (I learned the jargon too), and finally settled on LXLE 12.04.3 (now at 12.04.5). What a gem. Fast, simple, easy to maintain. With the age of the laptop, I had to stick with the 32 bit architecture. Using all the free open source packages to do everything that had previously cost me a fortune, all for nothing. That’s what FREE means to me.

13 years old laptop running Linux

This is my workhorse computer, all of my routine daily tasks are done on this 13 year old Acer laptop. Like me, it might be past it’s prime but it still capable of a good day’s work.

This year, I have converted a further five laptops, of various makes, onto the Linux platform. A friend’s Acer to LXLE, two neighbours’ laptops to Linux Mint 17.2 xfce, my wife’s Dell to LMDE v1 Cinnamon, and my own Acer Aspire 5735 to Linux Mint 17.3 ‘Rosa’ Cinnamon. All run LibreOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Chromium, Brasero, and GIMP, giving them compatible software to those previously used in their Windows 7 or Vista environments.

I am enjoying my journey with Linux, proving to myself that no-one is too old to learn something new, and am looking forward to many more excursions down the FOSS way. (That’s a play on words folks. The Fosse Way is an ancient Roman road in England, running 280 miles from Exeter in the South-West to Lincoln in the North-East).

For those already on a similar Linux journey, you will understand my enthusiasm for Linux and F.O.S.S. For those yet to join us, go for it, you won’t be disappointed.

In the end, my thanks to It’s FOSS, DistroWatch and ComputerActive magazine for giving me the information, support and confidence to embark on this wonderful journey.

Roy Davis

Roy Davies

A 70 years old former Production Engineer. I retired 15 years ago, having worked for 40 years for the motor industry in the UK.

The article was originally published in 2016 and has been updated since then. Roy notified me that his beloved laptop finally died.

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It is a nice story.
It shows what one can achieve with Linux on limited hardware
All that is needed is a little patience, willingness to learn, and not having expectations that are beyond the capacity of an old computer.

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Yes it is, but the expectations, that I have does not always apply, to just running Linux. I like to push an old PC, and see just how far I can take it in running Linux and Windows, and the Dell Inspiron 530, I am working on, has lived up to the task. So does this make me an enemy of Linux?

W11
W111920×1080 103 KB

It is now running W11 Pro!!!

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Nice story good to see it revive

You could invite other with old hardware to contribute.

I regularly do older machines and currently run a netbook with 1gb memory and linux mint xfce on it without any problems it dates around 2008. But my main machine is a 2012 with 4gb running lmde. Before a 2010 apple macbook pro with 12 gb memory and linux mint 19.3 32 bit version. (Yes i know 32 bits will not address more than 4 gb but did not want to remove the extra memory as part of my plan was to upgrade it to 64 bit and a newer version of mint at some stage, but apple hardware would not run any 64 bit linux version i tried so went back to mate and 19 at 32bit.)

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Forgot to ask if he is still around and in contact with you. Perhaps you can ask what he is using now… just hope he stayed with linux.

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This has inspired me to break out one of my IBM T40 Thinkpads… I think I’ve got a T42 somewhere… At one stage I had about 5 or 6 that I “inherited” which were going to the trash somewhere… Around 2008ish - I installed Ubuntu on 3 or 4 of them and sold them for about $250 each on a “pre-Facebook-Marketplace” (pre Gumtree even!) - I think it was a local outfit and the site was “bargainboard”… One guy I sold one to rang me up and asked did I have another one and could I burn him a Ubuntu CD - so I did…

I think I still have a T40 and a T42 left… I’ve got a box somewhere with spare power supplies for 'em too…

But I won’t use Linux - I’ll use FreeBSD I reckon… Last time I used the T42 I installed Open or Net BSD on it… Trouble is those HDDs in those things are getting a bit dodgy… Maybe I should look into small form factor compact flash to IDE adaptor for a laptop - I have a couple of them I used for PC - last one I used was in a Sun Ultra (Sparc) 5 running OpenBSD (the Ultra 5 was an ATX formfactor desktop with IDE drive controllers - not SCSI) - never really ran X on it (tell a like - I did run Solaris CDE on it - I miss CDE) - most RAM it can take is 512 mb - but those CF to IDE adaptors need a floppy drive style power cable from the AT or ATX power supply…

Can get 'em pretty cheap off Amazon ($9 AUD) - I have several multi gigabyte CF cards too…

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I thought Windows 11 had certain hardware requirements.

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@abhishek
It does!!! If you want details post me privately!!! It is really running quite well on the old hardware, takes a little longer to boot than W10, but when it gets up
and running, it runs qute well.
I did this install, in response to @Skywalker71 and his problems with Nvidia graphics, even I was surprised when I was able to install the Nvidia 8500GT graphics driver in W11.

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Why offer FreeBSD over light weight linux ?

I have never tried it but what is the advantages

Just out of interest

Suspect they only have small hard drives and lack memory

Think you sell them at a high price compared to the market here where I would have asked around 35 euros for the same but my clients at that time did not have much money so it was more of a service I offered

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FreeBSD will run in that easily. I used it in a 486 with 128Mb of ram. It even ran a window manager (twm). Modern Freebsd may be a bit larger, but it should be fine.

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Freebsd is not very different from Linux. It does separate the system from user binaries very strictly, and the kernel is a bit smaller( ie it will run in a smaller ram space). Linux has more drivers.
You can make a FreeBSD screen look exactly like Linux… it has all the same DE’s
The BSD licence is more permissive.

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Thanks for the explanation

Will drop round the site and have a more detail3d look

But at this stage will stick with linux and xfce not really interested in older machines any more my client base has more money so tend to be newer machines i work on and life expectancy on 20 year old technology has got to be limited, shame as had donated several at the start of the year and in the end scrapped them as could not find a recycle possible despite talking at length with our local council they thought the effort too great, hence landfill

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Here’s some useless info.

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Thank you for that. What it shows is that the essential part of the Linux kernel is very robust in the sense that it can be applied to almost any architecture.

There were quite a few Linux ports to 8 bit computers. I can remember Onyx on a Z80 at 2Mhz, but 4 bit is really something… it could only send half a byte at a time over the data bus.

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I have just inherited two apple macbook 140 with Motorola 68040 processors and 8mb ram. One works fine on mac os 7.5 but the other fails to boot with hard disk issues. I no longer have the system floppy disks and wondered about an early version of linux but as yet not found one that old or for Motorola processors… so i guess even linux has limits.

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There used to be BSD for Motorola processors.
We had BSD4.2 on a Motorola 68020
It was not free then … dont know if you could get it

The obvious place to go is Netbsd. They definitely have ports for motorola chips , but I am not sure about 68040. ? Have a search.

Yes they do
https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/mvme68k/
There is a challenge for you.

This might be closer to what you need
https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/mac68k/

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Thanks for finding that.
It does not mention the powerbook 140 or 150 which are basically the same machine but with slightly bigger disks, but does cover other powerbooks of the same age, plus the lc series and the se 30 so in principal it should work.

Challenge i have now is finding some floppy disks to load it onto as there is no usb port or cd player, also its before the mac came with internet connection

Another technical challenge.

I am away on holiday for another week so a job to look at when i return home.

Thanks for the extra work !
Only joking
Keeps my mind active and would be good to breath new life into one of these books afterwards not sure what to do with them …

My se30 and lc 475 i sold to a collector as a renovation project which he keeps reporting on his progress, they were both working just very old technology

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Not a 13 yr laptop but a 12 yr laptop!

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Bet i am not the only one using older technology and many sites now are suggesting linux over windows 11 as the upgrade is either not possible or just too difficult for the average home user.

Just picked up this article

Not a big fan of mx linux myself but looks and feels similar to other linux systems

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Indeed. My 12 year old desktop has always run Linux. It was a high spec machine when built in 2012, and that has helped its longevity. It will run several VM’s simultaneously without any performance hit.
and
It uses MX, among several multi-booted distros

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