New Life For an Old Computer

My old Toshiba comes back to life with Xubuntu Linux
My old Toshiba comes back to life with Xubuntu Linux

My Xubuntu desktop.  Clean, pretty, slow on my old computer, but very usable.
My Xubuntu desktop. Clean, pretty, slow on my old computer, but very usable.

(Updated – Original Post Sept 1, 2008)

I have a quite old Toshiba laptop. Carol and I are going on a missions trip to Moldova in October.  Many on our team to Moldova are bringing a laptop computer along so they can check e-mail, use Skype, and other stuff. My old computer had Windows 98 on it and has never been connected to the Internet. I decided I would try to breathe some new life into it so I can send e-mail and post to this web site from Moldova. It was quite a challange since it only has 128 MB of memory and I have about 2 Gigabytes of hard disk storage available. I decided to try a trimmed down version of Ubuntu Linux. I run Ubuntu on our desktop computers at home and there is a derivative of it called Xubuntu (Zoo bune too) that is supposed to be ideal for older computers. It requires 196 MB of memory and I only have 128 MB. I searched the internet and found a procedure to do the job.

I scratched my head for a couple of days trying to figure out how to do it, and with many failed attempts, I finally succeded. If you are a computer guru, this is what I had to do. I have an USB WIFI adapter that I had to plug into the only USB slot in the computer. I installed a command line version of Xubuntu. That means NO graphics, no desktop, no menus, etc. Once I had that installed successfully, I had to do some manual changes to some files so it would recognize my WIFI USB plugin. Then I had to install the graphical desktop and modify some other files. In the end, it worked!

The computer is very useful, but with such limited resources, I have to push a button and wait for the screen to draw all of its pieces, but it DOES work. In fact I am writing this post on it right now!
I am also testing out an e-mail system that I can use to send this to my blog and it will be posted. So really, you are reading an e-mail message I sent to the blog. Pretty nifty eh?

To see more information about our trip to Moldova, go to www.McDougallsHome.net/moldova . Click the blue and white box on the upper right to check out our daily posts about our preparations and trip to Moldova. John