# new life for old laptop



## gene_mingo (Oct 24, 2009)

I recently was given a very old laptop. Dell Latitude CPi. It has a PII 233 mhz cpu 128mb ram and 2 mb video ram. I believe the machine is close to 10 years old. I decided, due to age, to install FreeBSD 7.2 on it. The install went very well and now I am up and running. I am actually very surprised by the performance of the OS on such an old laptop.

Currently I have installed:
fluxbox
firefox 3
Nano (sorry to all you Vi guys out there, I can't stand using it)

Next I will add open office and Bash.

I wanted to try Ubuntu, but my poor laptop didn't make the min reqs. Can anyone one say bloatware?

And yes I am posting from the laptop right now. 

Well I just wanted to share with all the PB geeks out there what I am doing today.


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## Berean (Oct 24, 2009)

Sounds good, Josh! Congrats.


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## David (Oct 24, 2009)

gene_mingo said:


> (sorry to all you Vi guys out there, I can't stand using it)


I can't believe you just said that. 

A few years ago, I received a similar laptop. I installed FreeDOS on it, and that's how I learned all about the DOS command prompt (and got to replay some of my favourite childhood games). If it interests you, that's something else you might want to try.

It's amazing what UNIX and GNU/Linux can do for an old PC.


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## Jake (Oct 24, 2009)

I had one of those given to me. It had XP on it at the time.. I later put RHEL and then Ubuntu 5.04 on there (which is still on there I believe). I actually ran it with a version of KDE 3! However, I think the RAM had been upgraded.

Have a try at using jed. It is a more functional yet still simple CLI text editor with Emacs keybindings. Also, a lighter web browser would go a long way. Kazehakase is a nice one that uses the same rendering engine as Firefox, although I'm more partial to Opera.


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## uberkermit (Oct 24, 2009)

gene_mingo said:


> I recently was given a very old laptop. Dell Latitude CPi. It has a PII 233 mhz cpu 128mb ram and 2 mb video ram. I believe the machine is close to 10 years old. I decided, due to age, to install FreeBSD 7.2 on it. The install went very well and now I am up and running. I am actually very surprised by the performance of the OS on such an old laptop.
> 
> Currently I have installed:
> fluxbox
> ...



Good stuff. I inherited an old PII 400 with 192 Mb of RAM. I stripped out everything I didn't want (sound card, and some other stuff) and installed FreeBSD. The thing would hardly run with XP (not enough RAM), but it works well with the new system. Mind you, I didn't install X; I just hooked up an old keyboard and mouse (because my BIOS would not allow me to boot without those), and then when I want to use it, I just ssh in from another machine. I use it for development, but one of these days I am going to stick an old 200 GB ATA drive in it and use it as a backup server. I might even buy some RAM. It's an Asus board with 4 slots and, when fully populated, will hold up to 1024 Mb. Sweet..

As for Vi, I used to hate it, but now I love it. Take some time to learn it, and you will love it too. Look up Daniel Robbin's Vi cheat sheet, and you will be on your way. As for nano, that brings back fond memories of using Pine, but now I have Alpine set up to use (you guessed it) Vim as my default editor. Many thanks to a fellow in my church for putting me on to that. (You know who you are  )


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## David (Oct 24, 2009)

uberkermit said:


> As for Vi, I used to hate it, but now I love it. Take some time to learn it, and you will love it too. Look up Daniel Robbin's Vi cheat sheet, and you will be on your way.


I think everybody should give Vi a fair go. It's possibly the most life-changing program I have ever used. The commands sound absurd when you first start, but after about a month of regular usage, you'll really see why they make so much sense.

:wq


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## Jake (Oct 24, 2009)

David said:


> uberkermit said:
> 
> 
> > As for Vi, I used to hate it, but now I love it. Take some time to learn it, and you will love it too. Look up Daniel Robbin's Vi cheat sheet, and you will be on your way.
> ...



Ah, get a real editor like ed! The standard editor.


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