My Linux Laptop
I happened to intercept an old Toshiba Satellite 310CDS laptop heading for the skip. It seemed a waste, seeing as it still functional, so I gave it a new home. It had Microsoft Windows95 on it, which gives you some idea of it’s age. I wiped the harddisk and installed Windows98, but this didn’t improve matters much as it then spent most of it’s time hourglassing. Despite attempts to strip out all the non-essentilal stuff it still wasn’t very ‘useful’. It was about to resume it’s journey to the skip, when I had the idea to look on the Internet for alternative operating systems, ideally at low/no cost.
It’s all a bit of a blur but I now have a laptop running Damn Small Linux - an operating system designed to fit on and run from a 50mb credit card sized CD-ROM, although I’ve taken the option to install it to the harddisk in this instance. I now have a laptop that will do the basics - surf the Internet, word process, play music files and CDs, and operate an external CD writer/DVD player (although the hardware can’t cope with DVD playback).
Possibly not the easiest way to introduce yourself to Linux, but if you’re interested, visit www.damnsmalllinux.org for more information.
