So I have this old laptop that I'm trying to get working again . It's a dell inspiron 7000 with a 333mhz PII processor and 128 mb ram, and a dvd player. I want to be able to browse the web, use hulu, maybe possibly play some older windows games under wine. I've played around in knoppix and ubuntu and know basic command line so I thought it would be cake. Instead however, I haven't even been able to get a functioning desktop at all. These are the problems I've had.
Fedora 10:
This is the fist distro I tried. It installed all right but when I loaded up the graphical desktop it was completely unusable. I wanted to try and install a lighter desktop manager like icewm or xfce (it was using gnome) but wasn't sure what kind of package I needed. I heard there was native fedora packages but was never able to find those. Not terribly important now because Fedora won't boot at all. I just get:
Could not detect stabilization
reading all physical volumes
incorrect metadata check sum
volume group "VolGroup00" not found
Unable to access resume devive (/dev/volgroup00/LogVol0/)
mount: error mounting /dev/root on /sysroot as ext3: no such file or directory
OpenSuse 11.1:
I tried this next because I heard it ran well on older hardware, could natively install xfce, and was easy to use and configure. After I go through the graphical installer walk-through (including telling it how to repartition the hdd) it goes to a different installer then simply tells me that an error occurred during installation. I can't ever get past that. The most recent attempt today I got an additional error right before that telling me that it couldn't shrink the swap partition with a system error code -3002. Haven't looked it up yet but the configuration I had set up was to format and repartition, not shrink.
puppy linux:
Heard this ran great even on stuff like PII's. I can't even get the computer to acknowledge that the disk is there. Tried to versions. Both work on other computers.
As for the computer itself I ran memtest at the beginning with no errors. I'm running it again now. It also displays a weird error during POST.
Amount of system memory has changed or suspend to disk file is absent
Then goes on as normal. I don't know exactly what that means.
Anyway, if anyone could provide some insight on how to get this working I'd very much appreciate it. I'm lost.
Fedora 10:
This is the fist distro I tried. It installed all right but when I loaded up the graphical desktop it was completely unusable. I wanted to try and install a lighter desktop manager like icewm or xfce (it was using gnome) but wasn't sure what kind of package I needed. I heard there was native fedora packages but was never able to find those. Not terribly important now because Fedora won't boot at all. I just get:
Could not detect stabilization
reading all physical volumes
incorrect metadata check sum
volume group "VolGroup00" not found
Unable to access resume devive (/dev/volgroup00/LogVol0/)
mount: error mounting /dev/root on /sysroot as ext3: no such file or directory
OpenSuse 11.1:
I tried this next because I heard it ran well on older hardware, could natively install xfce, and was easy to use and configure. After I go through the graphical installer walk-through (including telling it how to repartition the hdd) it goes to a different installer then simply tells me that an error occurred during installation. I can't ever get past that. The most recent attempt today I got an additional error right before that telling me that it couldn't shrink the swap partition with a system error code -3002. Haven't looked it up yet but the configuration I had set up was to format and repartition, not shrink.
puppy linux:
Heard this ran great even on stuff like PII's. I can't even get the computer to acknowledge that the disk is there. Tried to versions. Both work on other computers.
As for the computer itself I ran memtest at the beginning with no errors. I'm running it again now. It also displays a weird error during POST.
Amount of system memory has changed or suspend to disk file is absent
Then goes on as normal. I don't know exactly what that means.
Anyway, if anyone could provide some insight on how to get this working I'd very much appreciate it. I'm lost.
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