old laptop

Forum: Laptops
Topic: old laptop
started by: mj123

Posted by mj123 on June 21 2004,01:21

I am getting a compaq presario 1260 laptop,333mhz,64mb ram,4gb hd with cd-rom.I'm new to linux and came across DSL.
I wanted to know if this will work on the above laptop and how easy to use it is for someone starting with linux

Posted by skaos on June 21 2004,10:06

Your laptop should work fine with DSL (maybe except for some possible colour problems). As for the use, right-click to get a menu.

Posted by writeson on June 23 2004,11:11

mj123,

I'm trying to install DSL on a Compaq Presario 1800 and having a little trouble. The system installs fine, but I can't get the touchpad to work, the cursor just locks itself down to the bottom of the screen, though the rest of the system works fine. Just giving you a heads up on the problem I'm having.

Doug

Posted by AwPhuch on June 23 2004,17:15

Quote (mj123 @ June 20 2004,21:21)

DSL will scream on this machine!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I had a 233Mhz machine with 96Meg ram and it kept pace with a 733Mhz running M$!!

More RAM you have the faster your system will run!!

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by clivesay on June 23 2004,20:00

mj123 -

I am a 6 month beginner to Linux. I have absolutely no development experience.

My opinion is this is a good place to start the learning process. Some of the veterans of this forum gave me alot of hand-holding in the beginning! In this amount of time I have learned enough to do alot of maintenance and even remaster a Knoppix distro (Feather Linux). I would recommend, as a beginner, Damn Small and Feather for light distros and MEPIS for a newer machine with 256mb RAM and up. I do have a preference of the Debian/Knoppix way of doing things.

I don't recommend these just for the distros themselves. I recommend them because of the communities. All three of these have VERY helpful people in their forums with a wealth of info. They are also very nice which isn't always the case in other forums. You might witness the occasional tangent but nothing that is ever condescending to the new people.

People within these distros will tell you that places like Google, Knoppix.net, Debian.org, Linuxquestions.org, Linuxprinting.org and, of course, the 'Search' button in the forums are your greatest wealth of information. It's a really good practice to do a search in a forum before posting a question.

I'll tell you one thing up front that took me a little while to figure out. Most of the files that you will edit within /home/damnsmall or /home/knoppix are hidden. When you open up EmelFM, click on the "H" in the upper left hand corner to view these files. As a beginner I did quite a bit of fruitless searching for files to edit before I realized I needed to see the hidden files!

I hope this helps! Enjoy Linux.

Chris