Installation questions on old laptops

[warpman]

I have downloaded and installed Salix-XFCE-13.37. I'm really happy to tell everyone that I has able to installed it on a couple of old laptops. One of them has is an Sony Vaio with an AMD processor and 256mb of memory and a 20gb hd. The other is another Sony Vaio with a pentium 3 processor and 128mb of memory and a 5gb hd.

3 issues/questions on the one with 256mb of memory.
- I went ahead and did a full install. I run an update on the packages and now my firefox and opera browsers doesn't work.
- The second issue is when I tell it to shutdown it doesn't shutdown. It stays on with the System halted message. I have to manually shut it down.
- The third question/issue is how can I speed up this old laptop? I'm thinking about installing Enlightenment or Fluxbox instead of XFCE.
Any ideas?

1 question on the the one with 128mb of memory. I went ahead and installed the version with the minimum windows manager. The only problem that I have on this one is that the ethernet cards are not been loaded. I have 2 cards. 1 is a Linksys PCM100 and the other one is an Airlink Wireless AWLC5025. How do I load and install the modules for these cards? Both cards are recognize by the 1st laptop.

Both laptops appear to have good speed not the best but for the age of these laptops I'm OK with the speed but if there is something to be modify to increase the speed it would be great.

Thanks for your help in advanced.

[mimosa]

LXDE is another option, and has more lightweight options installed as the default, such as the midori web browser. But you could equally put that in Salix Fluxbox or your existing xfce. Maybe test live versions first to see how they perform.

When you say "minimum windows manager", do you mean you installed Basic? Again, it might be worth testing with the Live equivalent to see how the network performs. Basic isn't really "minimal" - it just comes with hardly any apps, which saves space. On that second laptop, you may need to

I don't know that much about network setup, and I expect you've tried searching the Salix forum and beyond. As a starting point, from the console, lsmod will give you information about the kernel modules that *are* present, and ifconfig -a will list all available interfaces. If you can see eth0 or similar, it might be worth trying

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#ifconfig eth0 up   #or eth1, or whatever
#dhcpcd

but that won't help if you really do need to add specific modules. The point is just to rule out the easy solution.

If you can get wired networking working, install wicd from the repos. This should make it much easier to set up your wireless connection, but I believe it isn't included in Basic, maybe because its dependencies take up twenty or thirty megabytes. Then I think you need to do

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#service start wicd

to turn it on, or just reboot.

Regarding Firefox, as I said you could just use a more lightweight browser (which might suit you better anyway on those machines) possibly with Privoxy for adblocking. Alternatively you could downgrade, in which case you need to blacklist Firefox in the package manager so you keep the version you want.

[warpman]

LXDE is another option, and has more lightweight options installed as the default, such as the midori web browser. But you could equally put that in Salix Fluxbox or your existing xfce. Maybe test live versions first to see how they perform.

When you say "minimum windows manager", do you mean you installed Basic? Again, it might be worth testing with the Live equivalent to see how the network performs. Basic isn't really "minimal" - it just comes with hardly any apps, which saves space. On that second laptop, you may need to

I don't know that much about network setup, and I expect you've tried searching the Salix forum and beyond. As a starting point, from the console, lsmod will give you information about the kernel modules that *are* present, and ifconfig -a will list all available interfaces. If you can see eth0 or similar, it might be worth trying

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#ifconfig eth0 up   #or eth1, or whatever
#dhcpcd

but that won't help if you really do need to add specific modules. The point is just to rule out the easy solution.

If you can get wired networking working, install wicd from the repos. This should make it much easier to set up your wireless connection, but I believe it isn't included in Basic, maybe because its dependencies take up twenty or thirty megabytes. Then I think you need to do

Code: Select all

#service start wicd

to turn it on, or just reboot.

Regarding Firefox, as I said you could just use a more lightweight browser (which might suit you better anyway on those machines) possibly with Privoxy for adblocking. Alternatively you could downgrade, in which case you need to blacklist Firefox in the package manager so you keep the version you want.

Mimosa, thanks for the info but at this moment cards are not been recognize and therefore I cannot run any network commands.

[mimosa]

The output of

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#lspci | grep -i wireless

#-i to ignore case

should tell you which card you have. Double check with lsmod to make sure you don't have the module already. Then try looking for more info at:

http://linuxwireless.org

Also please post what the cards are; it's possible someone else will be able to give you more specific help. Or maybe it's already on the forum somewhere.

EDIT Ah, sorry, I see you already did, which makes most of this post redundant!

The numbers may not be quite the same, so you may prefer not to narrow down the output with grep. Here's the relevant output from this machine (with usb wireless not an internal card):

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root[vanilla]# lspci | grep net
01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications L2 Fast Ethernet (rev a0)
root[vanilla]# lsusb | grep Wireless
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 148f:2573 Ralink Technology, Corp. RT2501/RT2573 Wireless Adapter
root[vanilla]# lsmod | grep rt
parport_pc             18218  0 
parport                25627  3 lp,ppdev,parport_pc
rt73usb                21322  0 
rt2500usb              16942  0 
rt2x00usb               7244  2 rt73usb,rt2500usb
rt2x00lib              25762  3 rt73usb,rt2500usb,rt2x00usb
mac80211              181473  2 rt2x00usb,rt2x00lib
cfg80211              122542  2 rt2x00lib,mac80211
root[vanilla]# lsmod | grep l2
atl2                   20687  0      #I think this is the ethernet card module

[warpman]

Thanks for the info Mimosa. I was able to identify the 2 modules that I need to load.
1. rtpci, rt2x00pci
2. yenta_socket

So, the next step is how do I load these modules from CD since I have no network connection on these laptops?

I also would like to install NDISWRAPPER from CD.

Any ideas?

[mimosa]

Did you get ndiswrapper from the Salix repos? If not, that's the best source. You should have a .txz file. Just do (from memory)

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#installpkg ndiswrapper_foo.versionnumber.txz

or you can use pkgtool which goes through all suitable files in the directory you run it from and asks if you want to install them.

Regarding the modules, I'm not sure off the top of my head, but there are probably posts on this forum with instructions for other modules. If your case is straightforward, the procedure is probably much the same. If you get stuck please post (in fact, please post anyway describing your successful solution )

[warpman]

Mimosa, I have a couple of questions. I was able to setup my network card and configure it properly, so I was able to connect to the web etc... Now I have installed a wireless card. The laptop sees the card as wlan0. I'm having a difficult time configuring properly. I have installed ndiswrapper and Wicd Network Manager but the Wicd doesn't see my wireless router. Is there an easy way to configure my wireless connection?

Second, the resolution on my display shows as 800x600 how do I change it to 1024?

[mimosa]

How did you set things up in the first place? If you used netconfig, did you follow the instructions to undo that before installing wicd? I imagine you must have, if wicd is now working for your wired connection.

The first thing would be to have a fiddle with wicd and make sure there isn't anything to turn on. The interface is very intuitive, but I remember having trouble once because of something in "properties", I think. I don't have it in front of me because I'm using Salix Ratpoison, so I can't be more specific. I'm sure you've already had a good look at the options, but it may be worth looking again. Certainly, you need to set up the connection; for instance, tell wicd your password, depending how your router is set up.

Failing that, investigate manually - short of creating a manual configuration, at first. Here are some notes from when I did this a while ago:

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#ifconfig -a #you could post the part of the output relating to wlan0; is there anything else that could be your card?
#iwconfig #post the wlan0 output too
#ifconfig wlan0 up
#iwlist wlan0 scan #this should tell you what signals the card can see

... and if there are any, you've got one step further than you managed, and it's a strong indication that wicd ought to work.

The next (manual) step depends on what sort of encryption you're using.

Assuming none of this works (as unfortunately seems likely), the problem may lie with how the card is configured rather than the connection. You say you installed ndiswrapper - what did you do to set up the card?

I don't know about the screen resolution, but there should be a menu option under "Settings". Or maybe it's "System".

[gapan]

You also probably need to check if you have the appropriate firmware package installed.

[GJones]

Some tips for low-end computers:

- Don't use Abiword. Forced "smooth scrolling" makes it slower than LibreOffice on old computers.

- KDE is slow, but KDE applications are fairly fast when run outside of the environment. Fluxbox or whaver + KDE applications is a pretty good desktop.

- If your graphics hardware is badly supported, the vesa and fbdev drivers may actually provide better performance. On my netbook and laptop (both with Intel GPUs), fbdev has 2D performance pretty much on par with the accelerated intel driver, and apparently better for some tasks. Note that, if you need KMS to set the resolution properly, you want to use fbdev; vesa's mode setting conflicts with KMS.