Portable vectorlinux for newbies.

[haywire]

I noticed many threads here discussing laptop installations and the various problems people have had.

I was curious if there were not a few cheap older laptops one might find on ebay (say around the 2 or 3 hundred dollar range) that work very well with vector linux 5.9?

In other words, if you have a laptop you have installed vectorlinux 5.9 on, and when you were done, your major components (video, sound, mouse, network card,modem) all worked... Can you please post your experience here in this thread with your laptop info?

I have an older sony vaio but I'm hesitant to try to install vector on it... However if I knew of a brand/model # that one of you had a great installation experience that I could pick up cheap... I'd hunt one down on ebay and go for it.

I'm hoping there has to be a few older laptops around that install very well with vector... and one I can grab cheap on ebay and save myself alot of headaches.

I'm looking for something ideally around 500+mhz with 256megs of ram, a dvd burner and 10+ gigs hard drive space.... Any suggestions?

Also, I have had some bad experiences linux partitioning/formatting hard drives, IF I do try and install vector on my sony vaio and it goes horribly wrong... How easy is it to remove lilo and restore the hard drive to its previous state?

Thanks for listening... er reading even.

Steven


LLL-edit: Made the original post title a little more sensitive/appropriate.

[kc1di]

I noticed many threads here discussing laptop installations and the various problems people have had.

I was curious if there were not a few cheap older laptops one might find on ebay (say around the 2 or 3 hundred dollar range) that work very well with vector linux 5.9?

In other words, if you have a laptop you have installed vectorlinux 5.9 on, and when you were done, your major components (video, sound, mouse, network card,modem) all worked... Can you please post your experience here in this thread with your laptop info?

I have an older sony vaio but I'm hesitant to try to install vector on it... However if I knew of a brand/model # that one of you had a great installation experience that I could pick up cheap... I'd hunt one down on ebay and go for it.

I'm hoping there has to be a few older laptops around that install very well with vector... and one I can grab cheap on ebay and save myself alot of headaches.

I'm looking for something ideally around 500+mhz with 256megs of ram, a dvd burner and 10+ gigs hard drive space.... Any suggestions?

Also, I have had some bad experiences linux partitioning/formatting hard drives, IF I do try and install vector on my sony vaio and it goes horribly wrong... How easy is it to remove lilo and restore the hard drive to its previous state?

Thanks for listening... er reading even.

Steven

Hi Steven,

I have VL 5.9 installed on my old Toshiba Sattilite 4300 , 300 MB ram 600MHZ machine 7GB H.D.
It works great found and configured everything except the winmodem which takes a little extra effort but can be used.  I use a plug in network card which is a Lynsky or something like that that works great. Note: I had PCLinux OS on this machine before and VL just plain runs fastrer and smoother. 

Removing Lilo is simple I assume you would be running some form of windows on the other partition if that is the case then all you have to do is stick in your windows back up disc , you did make one didn't you?  at the prompt when it boots type fdisk /mbr and it will restore the windows mbr and erase Lilo.

But with all the live partitioning disk out they now you should have no problem partitioning the drive.
(See Distrowatch) Good Luck and let us know how you make out
Dave

[hata_ph]

you may use VL live CD to test run on your old VAIO first..if it work then there should be no problem for the real installation....

[bigpaws]

You can also check Linux on laptops.

My 2 laptops Dell E1501 the components work,
but not many hotkeys working. The modem even
works.

The other laptop is HP zt1135 everything worked,
having S3 video was a real pain to get to render 3D,
the Linksys WMP54G installed pretty easily.

When looking for a laptop I check the compatibility
first. Saves me headaches.

Bigpaws

[exeterdad]

I have a new Gateway m-6309.  It's a BestBuy exclusive.  But All the 6000 series laptops are very closely related.  With the exception of the winmodem, a wacky button, and the "dvd" button, a FN key for "half-bright".  Everything works.  Sleep, hybernate are working with lot's of effort.  And volume, and brightness FN keys works with scripting.

[nightflier]

I have an Acer Aspire that I bought new for $400. Everything works but the winmodem. I don't need the modem, so have not bothered with it. I see a similar one for sale at Microcenter for $380 with 1G RAM, 80G HDD. At those prices I'd give a new one serious consideration over a used $2-300 one.

[rbistolfi]

I have an omnibook 900. It is in the range you are looking for, a 650mhz Copermmine cpu and fully upgraded the ram to the max capacity of 310mb. Everything works out of the box, video, sound, wifi. The only thing I never tested yet is the infrared device.

[haywire]

I think I will take the plunge and install vectorlinux on my sony vaio laptop...

I do still use xp on it so it will have to be dual booted. The old xp installation (same install it came with years ago) is now pretty crappy and news a re-install from original disks.

I will have to copy my data off to cdrs first, then re-install xp, then install vector. Thats quite alot of work... This could take awhile, but I'll report the results as I get this done in the next week or so.

Steven