Have a older laptop. Don't throw it away. It can still be useful. I have a Gateway Solo 2550 and I decided to put Ubuntu Linux on it to bring it new life. Here are the specs of my laptop:
CPU: Pentium III 600 Mhz
LCD: 13.3 inch 1024x768
Video: SMI Lynx EM4 Video Graphics Accelerator (4 mb)
HD: 4 gig Hitachi
Ram: 192 MB
Sound: ESS Maestro 2E-1978 with PCI interface
Wireless: Cabletron (Prism2 chipset)
The installation:
Everything here went fine. No problems with hardware detection or screen problems. The touchpad worked fine along with the USB mouse I had. The wireless card I had also worked perfectly fine. It was detected and worked at boot. The only problem in installation was the hard drive size. Things were a little tight when installing, but I managed to slip by. A larger hard drive should would have been nicer though.
On boot-up Gnome runs very well on this hardware. Boot up is very quick along with the login time. It tends to slow down when coming across a lot of flash on the internet, but that typical for a computer of this age.
What worked:
The Video and LCD were detected without a problem along with the laptops battery system. The sound also works right off install. No setup or configuration is needed.
What didn't:
The integrated modem. This is to be expected. Its very hard to find a modem that is supported under Linux out-of-the-box. The modem is the laptop is a Lucent V.90 56K modem. Its detected, but there are no drivers available. This isn't a huge deal to me seeing as I connect, and most other people, connect through a wireless card.
Conclusion:
If you are looking to install Linux on your Gateway Solo 2550, look no further.
More information:
To find our more about Linux and Laptops visit TuxMobil.org or Linux-Laptop.net. They have a wide variety of Laptops running Linux.
3 comments:
I have a Gateway SOLO 2500 with the PII 233 and 222MB RAM that I am now trying to upgrade to Ubuntu from XP. The biggest hurdle I have to overcome is that I replaced the original CDRom with a DVD+-RW that works great, but I can't get the machine to boot from it. I also can't get it to boot from any other hard drive I put in there.
I am in the process (as I type this) of installing Ubuntu via WUBI to an external USB hard drive. We'll see how well it works.
It may be a brick, but I love the form factor of my old SOLO 2500.
Why doesn't anyone make 4:3 laptops anymore?
I'm trying to download and install the OS but I see no place to download it from on this page. Where can I go?
Ubuntu 5.10 is no longer supported. You can download the latest version of Ubuntu from ubuntu.com.
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