In the middle of last year I bought a Dell Latitude C400 2nd hand, after using it for about 10 months. It ran WinXFP (sic). And it had a superb screen. So far so good.
Being a small lappie it has no CD drive, and there's only 7 Gb free on the hard disk.
And I want Debian on it, to match my dual-boot home PC.
Well, now I've converted it to dual-boot, but it took a few steps:
o Get into BIOS. Oops. Kbd is locked up
o Upgrade hard disk from 20 Gb to 80 Gb.
o Upgrade BIOS
o Get into BIOS. Oops. There's no option to boot from a USB device. How to install Debian?
o Swap drive into friend's IBM lappie
o He boots from a Ubuntu V 6 disk because he likes the partition editor
o Resize 1 partition to be 3:
-- WinXFP 30 Gb
-- Debian 48 Gb
-- Swap 2 Gb (for a 1 Gb RAM machine)
o Now boot Debian (etch) disk and install
o Reinstall hard disk in Dell
o Boot to command line since X is confused
o Run dpkg-config and friend reconfigs X with great skill
o Reboot into GUI. Yay!
o Spend hours installing desired software:
-- gcc
-- Apache + mod_perl + mod_fastcgi
-- Postgres
-- TrueCrypt
-- Firefox
-- FileZilla
-- CPAN and friends (copied ~/.cpan from desktop)
-- PgAdmin
-- Emacs
-- Open Flash Chart. Yay!
-- Expat
-- A few directories from the desktop
(This makes me think someone ported The Neverending Story to Debian).
o I love flash drives
Almost finished - Time for a swim,
I bought one for £50, and installed Ubuntu. We gave it to DanDan as his main Christmas present. The major problem was that it only came with default 128MB on board RAM. I bought a 256MB memory stick and then the install was a breeze. It could do with a bit more memory for some of the games DanDan plays, but apart from that, it runs rather nicely.
It's also now Nicole's backup laptop, seeing as her Dell Latitude has developed a fault with the wifi mini-card, and the Netgear USB wifi stick I got to replace it doesn't seem to like Linux
