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Win95 or Linux for old Toshiba Satellite Pro 480 CDT?

Y

Yeem

Member
It's an oldie, 233mhz Intel processor. My dad ran format c: on it and asked me if I could fix it up for my mom to use. It had been running Win95 and worked fine, albeit slowly.

I was wondering if I should try a low system requirements Linux distro or just get an old Windows 95 cd from somewhere and try to make the best of it.

How many problems (related to incompatibilities/'laptopiness') will I have to fix before I get *insert recommended Linux distro* working? Is it worth it?

She'll be using it to do basic stuff like checking her mail and whatnot, so I'm not loving the prospect of using and old, insecure OS like Windows 95.

Any and all feedback is welcome! 😀
 
As far as Windows goes, Windows 98SE, which has similar hardware requirements and drivers, would be a lot more desirable than Windows 95. I recently spent many hours with both OSes on some older hardware, and Windows 95 is pretty frustrating to work with and knows nothing about USB (if the laptop even has USB ports).
 
Alright, thanks. I'll try Macpup and have 98SE as a fallback OS if I encounter too many problems with Linux. I'll update with the results when things are up and running.

Cheers.
 
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I just noted that Win98SE had larger memory requirements than Win95. I didn't recall that there was a big difference, but it seems there was. You didn't mention the installed memory on that Toshiba, but you might want to check and compare it to Windows 98 requirements (in the 24MB+ realm).

Edit: That Toshiba came with 32 MB of emmory as standard, with 160 MB maximum, along with a 3.8 GB hard drive.

http://www.bjassociates.com/480.htm
 
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I would go with DSL, Windows 9x has not been supported for a while, thus no security updates. On the plus side, the latest malware does not target it.
 
Definitely one of the Linux derivatives mentioned above. With no support, and outdated security an older Windows just doesn't make sense.
 
Alright, time to resurrect this thread as I've finally gotten around to do this. And naturally problems have arisen.

Here's what went down:

-I downloaded the latest Macpup Opera 2 .iso and burned it with ImgBurn.

-I popped it in, it finished step 1 smootly (loading drivers to read hdd or something similar).

-Step 2 failed. I got the 'pup-431.sfs not found' error as described here. Apparently ImgBurn thought it was a great idea to change all the file names to allcaps, so pup-431.sfs became PUP_431.SFS. Of course the correct file wasn't found. I wasted two cds before finding this out. Burned one with ImgBurn in Win7 and one with Brasero in Mint8.

-So I solve this by extracting the files from the .iso with 7zip and burning them with Windows 7 built in burning software. Just tossing them into the folder and hitting burn. Success?! No. The cd isn't bootable.

And that's as far as I've gotten at this point. I've learned two things.
1. Use cd-r/w:s
2. Ask for help after the second cd is botched.

So here's my question: How do I burn a bootable cd without allcaps?

I figure the easiest way is to "Create image file from files/folders" with ImgBurn using the extracted content from the original .iso and making it bootable. The only question remaining then is, which boot image do I use? Bootable_NoEmulation.img in the [BOOT] folder or isolinux.bin in root? I'm pretty sure I should use the .img, but I don't feel like making another frisbee.

Or should I go about doing this in some other way?

Thanks for reading my wall of text. ^_^
 
There must be something wrong with your iso image. To verify, I first downloaded the Macpup Opera 2 iso, mounted it and listed the contents:

Code: 
# mount -t auto -o loop Macpup_Opera2.iso iso
# cd iso
# ls
boot/        boot.cat      boot.msg  initrd.gz     isolinux.cfg  pup-431.sfs
boot000.cat  boot.catalog  help.msg  isolinux.bin  logo.16       vmlinuz

No capitalized filenames to be found.

Just to be sure there isn't something else wrong I booted a virtual machine from the iso, which worked as expected. To be extra sure, I burned the iso to CD with K3B (default settings) and booted a vm, and again, no problem. Finally, I burned the image on a Vista machine using ISO Recorder 3.1 (default options) and once again booted it in a vm with no problems.

I can only guess you have a bad image. Make sure you have the correct image with md5sum.

Here's my md5sum:
Code: 
# md5sum Macpup_Opera2.iso 
f346a3dc0665d1c1aca11197778a8afa  Macpup_Opera2.iso
 
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From my experience, if you have trouble installing OS from CDs, many times it points to hardware problems, many times memory problems.
 
On second thought, there may be a conflict with the laptop itself. Try booting with the option "acpi=off".

BTW, have you tried booting it on another machine?
 
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