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Resuscitating a seven year old laptop
---------------------------------------------
Recently, I have spent a few hours trying to recover a very old Compaq
laptop, which I have been neglecting for years (actually my wife was using
it, by now she has her `new Eeepc`_ and the laptop has been sleeping for
a couple of months).
The laptop is seven years old, and it shows in its technical specifications:
- there are only 256 M of RAM (240 M + 16 M for the video card);
- the hard disk has 20 G, and it is pretty slow as compared to modern one;
- the video card is pretty poor, you can forget of installing compiz on it.
Moreover, the laptop was in a pretty bad shape:
- the Athlon processor heats a lot and under heavy load the machine
is likely to freeze;
- the builtin Ethernet interface does not work, as an aftermath of a
lightning storm of 4 years ago;
- the builtin CD Writer/DVD Reader stopped working 5 years ago;
- the external DVD Writer I bought 3 years go does not work either;
- the BIOS is unable to boot from the two USB ports which, BTW,
only support the prehistoric USB 1.1 protocol;
It was clearly difficult to install some other operating
system on it, to replace Windows XP. I did not want to buy another external
DVD Writer, since nowadays I have no need for it (I use an external USB
disks for my backups, it is cheeper than buying DVDs).
Luckily, by googling on the net, discovered the Smart Boot Manager
project: if you have a system which is unable to boot from an USB pen
or an USB drive, but has a floppy reader, you can boot from the smart
boot floppy and then dispatch to the real boot media to complete the
booting. I made a smart boot floppy and I was able to install
Ubuntu 8.10 on my laptop from a pen drive.
Moreover, a few weeks ago I did buy a wireless USB kit, since it was
really cheap (something like 14 Euros) and I used that to replace
the wired connection. The wireless card was recognized out of the box
by Ubuntu, without need of any external driver, whereas on XP I had
to download the custom drivers from the producer site.
That was a happy discovery, so I decided that trying to resuscitating
the laptop was worthy attempt. As I said, I installed the standard
Ubuntu distribution, but the performances were not spectacular.
Actually, the system was quite slow, and with Firefox open my memory
occupation was dangerously close to the top limit of 240 M.
It was clear that I should give up Gnome if I wanted to get a
snappier machine. So, I tried to install Xubuntu, which comes with
the lightweight XFCE desktop environment. With that configuration
the memory occupation was reduced and the machine was indeed faster,
but still too slow for my taste. I decided then to try plan B, i.e.
to go back to the good old Ice Window Manager (IceWM_) which I had
used in the past with an even older machine with only 128M of
memory. IceWM did the job: the memory occupation dropped down
to 90 M or less, and the machine is much more responsive.
Moreove I did install the `Roxio File Manager`_ instead of
Nautilus, and links_ instead of Firefox: with those little
changes the laptop has become very much usable. I did discovered
in the process that now links features a very neat graphic mode:
the trick is to install links2 (``apt-get install links2``)
and to start it with the ``-g`` option (``links2 -g``).
A minor glitch is that the NetworkManager applet is not enabled
by default, so I put this line in .icewm/toolbar file::
prog XTerm xterm x-terminal-emulator
prog links /usr/share/app-install/icons/wsjt.png links2 -g
prog nm-applet /usr/share/app-install/icons/wlassistant.xpm nm-applet
The format of the configuration file is pretty simple: every line
in it has the form ``prog alt icon app`` were ``app`` is the
executable application, ``icon`` is a path to an icon that will
appear on the toolbar and ``alt`` is the text which appears,
when you hover the mouse over the icon, or the text which replaces
the images if the icon is missing.
With this trick a little icon for the Network Manager Applet appears
on my toolbar and I can connect to the wireless simply by clicking on
it. The applet is relatively resource hungry (around 10 Megabytes) and
there are slimmer alternative out there, but for the moment I am
keeping it.
Generally speaking, IceWM seems to work well with Gnome applications:
in particular all the Gnome applications I have tried with an applet
in the task bar works as well under IceWM, and the applet appears
in the system tray.
Also, I removed the gnome-terminal, using the good old xterm instead.
An advantage of xterm with respect to gnome-terminal is that it
does not intercept the function keys, so it play better with programs
like htop or the Midnight Commander. Also, I have found out that
xterm used together with screen makes a good replacement for
heavy applications like the gnome-terminal or the KDE Konsole.
Plus, the scrolling is blazzing fast.
Since I always want to use a terminal with screen, it makes sense to
open it at startup. So, I wrote the following .icewm/startup file::
#!/bin/sh
xterm -e screen &
(notice that the startup file must be executable to be run).
.. _new Eeepc:
. _IceWM: http://www.icewm.org/
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