[PLUG] Fedora 14 vs. 2005 laptop

[John Jason Jordan]

On Thu, 24 Feb 2011 14:26:54 -0800
Keith Lofstrom <keithl at kl-ic.com> dijo:

>At the Clinic on sunday, a fellow brought in his Compaq R4000 
>laptop, and a Fedora 14 install disk, intending to combine
>them.  The R4000 is a large beast with a big screen, but
>the RAM and disk and optical drives on the various R4000
>versions range from pretty good to pathetic. 
>
>Unfortunately, his R4000 had 200MB of RAM, a 40GB hard disk, and
>(I'm guessing) a 4X CDROM reader.  He wanted to split up that
>hard disk between WinXP and Fedora, and had used Partition Magic
>to make two 5GB partitions for Fedora.  He was upset that Fedora
>would only install a minimal text-only system. 
>
>According to the Fedora website, the minimum install requirements
>for Fedora in RAM is 256MB for text and 384MB for graphics, with
>512MB recommended.  A complete set of packages could occupy as
>much as 9GB of hard disk.  I knew that 200MB was too little, but
>I was unaware that Fedora would automagically install text-only
>in these circumstances, and refuse to install graphically when
>the space was not available.  So I could not get the fellow to
>the "look, this doesn't work, you need more RAM or a leaner 
>distro" realization.

Several thoughts come to mind:

1) The Compaq R4000 can take up to 2 GB of RAM, and hard disks plenty
large enough. It also comes with nVidia graphics that can drive a
screen up to 1680 x1050, although not all R4000s come with that kind of
screen. My point is that the gentleman in question could easily upgrade
his R4000 to at least enough RAM to do the job, at a fairly cheap price.

2) The Compaq R4000 was my first Linux computer. I bought it brand new
from Compaq. This was back in the day when Breezy was the reigning
version of Ubuntu. I brought it to a Clinic at Riverdale School and,
after a couple hours of futzing with various 64-bit distros, I finally
got the screen running at 1680 x 1050 with Breezy. I later returned the
R4000 to Compaq after discovering that it was impossible to get the
wireless working, not even ndiswrapper would work. I replaced it with
an R3240, which served me well for two and a half years until I gave up
due to a hardware fault in the motherboard.

Having said all that, my R4000 (and R3240) came with 60 GB hard drives
and 2 GB RAM, because that is the way I ordered them.

3) You say his R4000 had 200 MB RAM, but that sounds odd. There are two
slots, so he could have had 192, 256, or some other multiple of 64, but
I don't see how he could have 200 MB. Not that it really matters, as
none of these numbers is sufficient. In fact, I can't imagine that it
would even run Windows if it has only 200 MB. (It comes with 32-bit
XP). 

>It would be good to have a discussion of the latest supported
>distros and applications for older and smaller machines.  As
>M$ turns a cold shoulder to folks with older hardware, we
>have an opportunity to gather lots of refugees.  Conversely,
>for many devices (pocket computers) the emphasis is moderate
>capability consuming miniscule power.  Those can also benefit
>from the leaner distros.

It would also be good to have a few RAM chips that we could sell to
people like the gentleman with the R4000. In practically every case
where we have had someone bring in an underpowered computer, the
computer could have taken additional RAM, if only we had some
available. Too bad I gave away the two 512 MB chips that I had. They
would have solved the problem with the R4000 right off.

I need to make a trip to Free Geek to donate a few items. Perhaps
before the next Clinic I can pop into the thrift store ask what kind of
RAM they have available and pick up a few miscellaneous sticks.