brainsnorkel.com

We have an old Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop with 1GHz Pentium (M?) processor, 384MB of ram and a 20GB hard disk. It had been struggling for a long while under the weight of many years’ of Windows XP creeping senility before it was unceremoniously dumped by J in anticipation of her receiving a shiny new MacBook.

The 8100 had sat around neglected for a while with out of date virus scanning software and pent-up demand for Windows updates. Mr 4 occasionally took “Green Eggs and Ham” for a ride on it whenever we forgot how long that laptop took to boot.

I wanted to try installing a flavour of Linux to see if the laptop could be resurrected as a useful member of the household for kids’ use. My trepidation was that wireless connectivity wasn’t as seamless on Linux as it is on OS X or Windows. We’re also running a WPA-PSK wireless network at home and anything more than WEP seems to cause difficulty.

Having relocated the original Windows XP disks, as a safety net, I downloaded Ubuntu and set about my task.

I had heard good and bad things about Ubuntu. The install CD is just a CD (not yet DVD sized, like Fedora Core) and a live CD at that. The requirements are a modest 2GB of disk space and 256MB of RAM. I decided against Edubuntu to start with - just to make sure I gave myself the best chance to get wireless going with a mainstream distribution.

It installed flawlessly. The installation detected the ATI graphics card, high resolution 14″ screen, sound device, and even the funky media control buttons above the Inspiron’s keyboard. The reborn laptop even feels snappy again.

As expected, wireless didn’t work on the Netgear WG511 PCMCIA card. I spent about 4 hours trolling forums and trying different things before I stumbled upon the magic recipe for making wireless work: summarised here.

With wireless working the Inspiron is a useful kids’ computer. I have installed a bunch of educational and games packages. The default Firefox browser is what the kids are used to and Adobe Flash is behaving itself sufficiently well to make Club Penguin and Lego sites as tolerable an experience as they ever are.

The not-so-good parts of the story are that VLC DVD playback is a touch too stuttery to be useful, and laptop hibernation is a one-way ticket. Green Eggs and Ham has been relegated to other computers.

Altogether it has been a very successful transition and an excellent use of an old clunker of a laptop. The new owners haven’t complained.