The laptop

This is a fairly ancient laptop that I have recently been experimenting with in order to give it to my Grandma as an introduction to computers.

The thing weighs 7 pounds = 3.17514659 kilograms, or thereabouts.

Ubuntu

Ubuntu 10.10 i386 installed OK. However, on attempting to log in, nothing would start: no file manager, no panels, etc. "Safe mode" did work, however.

I still haven't established exactly what Safe Mode does, but it does prevent compiz from loading. I couldn't figure out how to configure the appearance properties of the "main" desktop from the safe mode one ("desktop effects" were shown as turned off from "safe mode", but were evidently still on for the real one) so I just removed the compiz package, which cured the problem.

Older notes

I installed Debian 3.0 on this back in 2005 and made notes at the time that are largely irrelevant now. Back then, there were no vendor-supplied drivers for this chipset, and the SUSE project had their own you had to use:

ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/supplementary/X/XFree86/ATI/suse82/radeon_igp

External links