Yesterday, I was talking about setting up Linux on a old laptop - today I'm using that laptop to write this, while updating the machine I was using yesterday. That probably says something about how much I like this new Linux distro. I also set up a newer laptop with Linux Mint yesterday, setting it up as a dual boot machine, since there was an existing older version of Mint on that machine that I wanted to keep.
Deciding how to make use of some of the various machines that I have here is always a bit entertaining. It becomes very easy to lose track of the various machines, since there are quite a few of them in the house - one of the side effects of working in the IT world for many years. Most of them are older Pentium class machines, none of which have much memory or a lot of disk space (at least in today's terms), so most of them are ideal candidates for being repurposed as Linux boxes (or boxen as some of us prefer).
Right now the machine that is being updated is grinding through the most challenging part of the installation - repartitioning the hard drive to make room for the new system. This one is a bit trickier than the others because, unlike the newer laptop I did yesterday, this machine has no free space in the partition table and so the install process has to actually resize the existing partition. So far, so good. The partitioning process has completed and now the the installer is copying files from the installation CD.
Ironically, sometimes the older machines are easier to deal with than the newer ones. That was certainly true in the case of the laptops yesterday. Two of them. this one and its virtual twin, were both 10 year old machines with P3 processors and less than 500Mb of RAM. The newer laptop is an AMD64 dual core machine with a high-end NVidia graphics system and a bunch of other bells and whistles. In order for the installer to work properly, I had to set a few options for the install process, since the NVidia card needs special drivers that are not included in the install CD. Not a big deal, as they can be installed very easily after the installation is complete.
The desktop that is currently being updated is another AMD64 dual core beast with an NVidia graphics system, but the installer didn't need to be altered in this case (probably because it's an older graphics system and the installer recognized it without a problem). I did, however, have to disconnect the external US hard-drive that is usually attached to that machine before the partitioning portion of the install could run properly. At this point, the update is wrapping up, so I'll take a break here and finish that install. Back soon!
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