This past week, I have been helping supervisor from the gym at Cole Harbour Place to replace his (non-functional) computer with a functional one, but which doesn't break the bank.
We have several old computers downstairs in storage, and I therefore chose to use one as the base for his computer.
It became obvious after looking inside the computer that it would be no easy task to create a functional computer for him. The most recent one had previously been used as an administrator computer, and has a 333 MHz, Intel Pentium II processor. It has a 6 GB hard drive, and was able to be upgraded to 384 MB of PC100 RAM. Further improvements included the installation of a newer AGP graphics card, as well as the PCI wireless card from his previous computer.
Upon boot-up, I was greeted by the desktop of Windows 95. This was not optimal for his usage, due to the fact that he would need to be running up-to-date software in order to complete his work, and therefore a change of operating system was needed. Originally, I had planned to use Xubuntu, and used the Live CD installer to install the system. An alternative, and possibly better one, would have been to use the alternate installation disk, which does not boot into a Desktop Environment, but rather installs in the shell, in order to make installation more feasible on older systems.
I was faced with an unexpected issue when I first tried to boot up. After GRUB 2 (the boot loader) had loaded, it attempted to load the operating system, but was unable to, due to the following error:
error: unknown filesystem grub rescue >
I was completely lost at this point, even after searching around the Internet. Eventually, after finding some information, that the problem could lie in the handling of LBA on old systems. This basically deals with how the system deals with the individual blocks of data on the hard drive. With LBA enabled, GRUB was unable to correctly read the filesystem information, and therefore threw the error. After changing the disk mode from LBA to Normal, I was able to boot up properly.
Xubuntu is a Linux-based operating system, and uses an Ubuntu base. Unlike Ubuntu, however, which uses a resource-intensive Gnome desktop environment, Xubuntu uses XFCE, which is known to be much less resource-hungry. In the past, I have used Xubuntu on a 866 MHz Intel Pentium III processor, with much success, but this slower processor was not up to that task. Upon searching the Internet for possible other systems, I found some information for an Ubuntu metapackage for Lubuntu, which uses the LXDE environment. I installed it by issuing the command "sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop", and was able to easily select it to be the default system. After some configuration (including information found here, though some of it was a little outdated), the installation was completed and I was able to get down the final bits.
Even though it is an old system, the fact that I chose a modern operating system enabled me to install the USB printer (HP DeskJet 932C) and PCI wireless card (D-Link) without finding drivers for them.
In all, this was a relatively painless process, and I hope it will be of use to others in this situation.
