My old Toshiba comes back to life with Xubuntu Linux

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