Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Old Beast

My old faithful Toshiba laptop has decided to boot when it wants to boot. I have managed to, well quite frankly, bum an old beast of a laptop from a friend.

It is a Dell Inspiron 3800. It has a Windows ME sticker on the bottom. I installed Xubuntu and fluxbox. Now I hear there's a fluxbox Ubuntu flavor; I'll have to check that out soon. I did name the thing "oldbeast". It was usable with battery life of about an hour and twenty minutes. I did a couple of minor hacks to the get the network and battery applets to start when fluxbox starts. The 800 x 600 screen is rather limiting. Then the keyboard started going all flacky. I, K and < don't respond. So I connected it to my KVM switch...

WOW! Oldbeast's video card can display to my 20 inch LCD monitor! I'm going to put a screenshot in here but I don't know if blogger will link to the full size image.



There are a couple of irssi sessions, gimp, gnome system monitor, gkrellm and htop running in that shot. With a bad keyboard I don't know how useful this machine will be for anything but it is interesting that it can do 1680 x 1050.

File under "ways to waste time"?