I’ve been battling with trying to get a working Linux setup on my laptop for quite a while now. It’s an HP, with one of the usual wacky laptop graphics chipsets, a weirdo soft-modem and the processor is only a K6 at 466MHz.<\/p>\n
My first attempt was to install Gentoo<\/a>, so the laptop setup would be the same as my desktop PC. With Gentoo you build everything<\/em> from source, which takes forever on such an elderly machine. I also hit problems with some bits of KDE which would almost finish compiling then fail.<\/p>\n I lost patience with making Gentoo work on the laptop and tried doing a network install of Debian<\/a>. The first attempt failed when I discovered that the boot CD didn’t support PCMCIA, which makes using my network card tricky. The second attempt failed because I couldn’t be bothered with the amount of time it was taking to install.<\/p>\n Fortunately I’ve got a Knoppix<\/a> CD lying around, this is a pretty full-featured Debian system that runs from the CD. After a bit of poking about on Knoppix sites I discovered instructions<\/a> describing how to install it on your hard disk.<\/p>\n The hardware auto-detection was flawless, the installation only took about 20 minutes and I now have a working system complete with OpenOffice, KDE and loads of other software.<\/p>\n Now I just have to remember how to use Debian’s package management stuff again…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve been battling with trying to get a working Linux setup on my laptop for quite a while now. It’s an HP, with one of the usual wacky laptop graphics chipsets, a weirdo soft-modem and the processor is only a K6 at 466MHz. My first attempt was to install Gentoo, so the laptop setup would […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}