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Old Computer for Tuning
  • grantwtgrantwt September 2010
    Hello all,

    Been around the windows scene long enough, but brand new to linux aside from doing a dual boot Ububtu a year ago.

    I have an old laptop running windows 98, 1.27GB hard disk, 28MB RAM, and a Pentium(r) processor. The only thing I use this laptop for is tuning my truck when I go wheeling in the bush. I am running a megasquirt DIY fuel injection system.

    What I want to be able to do is use megalogviewer (http://www.ideasandsolutions.biz/MegaLogViewer/) to view datalogs and process some data, but that requires Java, and it also requires a newer version of Java than you can install on windows 98.

    What I want to know is will I be able to run this thing once I install SliTaz? My concern is that it has an old display adapter NeoMagic 128ZD, and other antiquated hardware that I will not be able to find drivers for if I change to SliTaz, so how do I know that SliTaz includes modules that will work?

    Thanks
    Grant
  • linbuflinbuf October 2010
    To see, if this is possible at all under Slitaz linux, I installed java (I.e. the icedtea6.jre pkg) and downloaded MegaLogViewer_v2.959.tar.
    I came up with a startup script start.sh, located in the same dir as the MegaLogViewer stuff. its contents are one line:

    /usr/lib/jvm/java-icedtea/jre/bin/java -Xms32m -Xmx200m -jar MegaLogViewer.jar


    and it works.... As I have no megasquirt DIY fuel injection system (or any supported other), I could not do very much.

    My computer is a Pentium 4 desktop with 1 GB RAM and plenty disk-space.
    Your harddisk should be large enough (provided you replace Win98 by Shitaz), but I think 28 Mb RAM is too small. Linux provides a VESA driver for the video, which can manage every modern video-card, but you will have to try out if it works on yours.

    One last remark: I used the cooked version of Shitaz, with the recent updates.
    I think it is needed.

    Good luck,
    linbuf
  • fijatequesuavefijatequesuave October 2010
    Hi All

    I have a Compaq Presario laptop 1215 Pentium I with the same graphics card Neomagic and 72 mb in ram

    I can tell you:

    Any version of SliTaz work with them (1.0, 2.0, 3.0, Vesa, Low Ram) Any version of Puppy work in this machine

    Only the following distros linuix work well

    Mitrax, a Serbian distribution of 50 mb, is in English.

    Austrunumi only in version 1.01, a Belarussian not come in English

    and DSL 4 and higher

    I use DSL . With Framebuffer 800 x600 and a frugal installation. In other disc I use FreeDos and in 3ª part i only stored files

    I think 28mb for your machine is poor. Shopping memory in Ebay

    I hope will be useful

  • DeagonDeagon October 2010
    I have a dell latitude cpi a366xt running slitaz 3.0 stable

    the only problem i had (except for the old lan card i just posted about) was with the NeoMagic graphics i have. where the on the display was an box in the centre about the size of a cup place mat containing the (supposed 800x600) xdesktop and a massive border of black, unsable screen.

    my neomagic is not the same as yours, its a 'magicgraph 256av' but all i did was install the "Linux-agp-2.6.30.6" package and reboot

    basically, slitaz runs amazingly well on this old win98 laptop (pentiumII 364mhz, 256mb ram, 120gb hdd)

    but i have rarely seen slitaz pass 64mb used ram or 60% cpu (unless i open Firefox or OpenOffice) and it only uses 800mb hdd space on my machine (AFTER installing LOADS of packages)

    I used to use DSL on this laptop (for more than few years) and it ran amazingly well too, however it uses the old 2.4.xx kernel (DSL is built from debian 3.0) and most (nearly all now) of the debian 3.0 repositories that DSL uses to download software are no longer existent. DSL would suit anyone who doesnt need new software and doesnt put that machine online very often. I don't think DSL has been maintained recently either, it seems that the O.S. is dead (at least for the moment) which is a major pity, since it was lighter slitaz and debian based ;)

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