[GTALUG] More pointless battles [was: I'm discarding an old notebook!]

[Evan Leibovitch]

YMMV, but for old system installations I try for one of three approaches:

   - For your usual distro, choose a GUI environment that starts with L or
   X instead of G or K (ie Lubuntu or Xubuntu)
   - Try one of the small distros designed explicitly for use on old
   hardware (such as Puppy)
   - Screw the GUI completely and install Ubuntu Server

All of them should be OK with the SSD.

Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada
@evanleibovitch / @el56


On Tue, Feb 15, 2022 at 5:25 PM D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
wrote:

> I've been shamed / intrigued into doing a bit more hacking on this
> Acer Aspire 9300 notebook.
>
> Spoiler: this was a waste of time.
>
> A little over 5 years ago I had replaced the HDD with an SSD and put a
> then-current Fedora (24?) on it (no Windows).  It was unreliable (for
> reasons I have previously explained).
>
> Now I've dragged out the old HDD and copied the Vista and Ubuntu 12.04
> installation from it to the SSD.  (Byte-for-byte, so the partition
> alignments are highly questionable.)
>
> MS Vista boots.  It doesn't know how to update itself (End of Life).
>
> Ubuntu 12.04 boots.  It doesn't know how to update itself either since it
> is no longer supported.  I fix that (somewhat) by hacking on
> /etc/apt/sources.list, replacing ca.archive.ubuntu.com with
> old-releases.ubuntu.com.  The newest update there was probably two years
> ago, but that's better than more than 5 years ago.
>
> While doing Ubuntu updates, the machine crashed a couple of times.
> Probably because it is using the nouveau video driver.  I wonder if I
> can enable the ancient no-longer supported proprietary driver at this late
> date?  Even if I can, apparently that path dies after Ubuntu 14.04 so it
> isn't really a solution.
>
> Back on Windows Vista, I tried updating Firefox.  A very slow process, but
> it seemed to complete (but not to the current version; possibly because
> Vista is no longer supported).  I ran Firefox's update again and got a
> blue screen (OS crash, not Firefox crash).
>
> At this point, I saw very little upside and had wasted a lot of time
> getting this far.  I cannot run current Windows 10 or current Linux. So
> I've given up.  I've stripped the SSD, the RAM, the WiFi card, and the DVD
> drive.
>
> ================
>
> Now I'm wasting time updating the three OSes on my Acer Aspire One 522, a
> netbook from 2011 (Fedora, Ubuntu, Win10).
> <https://www.notebookcheck.net/Acer-Aspire-One-522.46975.0.html>
> This is a very meagre machine: slow even in its day.  But it does run
> current systems.
>
> When I got it, I upgraded the RAM from 1G to 4G.  Win 7 Starter was
> crippled to use at most 2G (silly Microsoft market segregation games).
> The screen had too little resolution to install Win 8, but full Win 10
> Home is happy (a free upgrade; it will use all 4G).
>
> The netbook still has its original HDD.  Win 10 and Gnome both crawl
> unless they live on SSDs.  I intend to replace the HDD with the SSD from
> the scrapped notebook.
>
> Just a few years separate the Acer Aspire 9300 and the Acer Aspire One
> 522.  Yet the newer one is more usable now.  Still, the newer one is
> missing some modern conveniences: UEFI firmware and USB 3.x.
>
> There is a significant difference between a 17" notebook and a 10.6"
> netbook.
> ---
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