found a old laptop can linux work on it

[azusa]

Hey whats up so I found one of my moms old work laptops in the house. Only thing wrong with it, it needs a new hard drive. I am pretty sure if I asked her I could use it since the hard drive is gone on it.

I wanted to know if I got slackware could I use it on this pc.

Its a IBM Think book.

Intel centrino proccessor (i don't know the speed)

maybe 128mb or 256mb of ram.

It had xp on it so I am pretty sure linux will run fine on it. I just want to be sure before I throw the money on it to get a new hard drive.

It won't be used for anything else just learning linux and programming.

[thedotmaster]

You can almost run linux on a calculator
Well not quite, but you'll be able to run it EASILY on that.
Also, I believe the smallest linux distro is about 25mb. Is the HD totally buggered or is it just quite small?

[fly3rbug]

With other popular operating system vendors you need to buy new hardware almost every time you upgrade operating system to a newer version. With Linux, when you upgrade your system, you should expect that it will be working even faster then previous version on the same hardware. Imagine that you can use newest Linux systems even on machines as slow as Pentium 100MhZ. The user experience is of course lower on older computers, but it works!

If you have a look at hardware requirements for software/games that are simultaneously released on Linux and Microsoft Windows, you will see that Linux versions always need less resources to run the same applications.

Source "http://www.ubuntustory.com/speed".

If xp was able to run on it than linux can run on it.
Bythaway i run ubuntu 7.04 (linux) on a computer that once had windows 98 on it.

[azusa]

holy crap windows 98. Yea my dell is getting old and I am using for more music production than school anyway. So I am taking the extra laptop and using it for school work and also learning how to hack and code.

So I am gonna put xp back on it and also ubuntu I guess, still trying to figure out what distro will fit my needs.

but the hard drive is like fried you know when windows is loading screen when the blue bar is going across it just stays there and doesn't do anything. my mom took it back to her IT guy and he said the hard drive failed.

So I am thinking about getting 200gb hd for it and maybe putting more ram in it.

[TheMindRapist]

Go ahead and look on newegg.com for a hard drive, 250GB should be fine.
Then, get the Ubuntu .iso, burn it to a disk, and install.
Be sure not to deleted windows when you install, I did that, and it kind of sucked.

[azusa]

well update

I put xubuntu on the laptop....it wouldn't run ubuntu for some odd reason i think cause i burned the live cd at like 24x but i burned xubuntu at the lowest setting and it ran fine. The hard drive is fine on the laptop its just the computer had a virus that messed up windows. So i just did installed xubuntu on the whole hard drive and its working fine. I am enjoying it I just want to learn the command line stuff now.