Tiny Core Linux is Basically Magic
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Tiny Core Linux is a magical modern Linux distro that can run on literally a potato.
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4:14 Vinegar is an acid itself (~3-7% acetic acid), it will not neutralize an acid. The battery leakage is alkaline/basic (you can see on some batteries the word "alkali" even), this is why it can be neutrlize by the acid in the vinegar.
So when do we get buffered linux?
Thankyou! These are not lead-acid batteries from cars/trucks…
Immediately came here for this comment.
It neutralizes the "battery acid". The term is unfortunately widely misused to refer to any high absolute Ph substance from inside a battery.
Stop defending this witchcraft with "science"
Running a "current" build of firefox in a 20+ years laptop is an amazing achievement of the open source community, modern browsers need a lot of bells and whistles to run anything knowadays media related, but keeping active a 20+ years computer and still functional and web compatible is an testament of the open source ethos
i mean, it kinda did fail to run anything media related, aside from images, due to no bells and whistles. but yeah, still not bad for a lightweight browser on nearly three decade old hardware
Does it really count if it can't actually do much though?
@@InfernosReaper Yeah, the device doesn't have the hardware that's needed to run stuff, as it's 20 years old lol. The hardware doesn't have OpenGL to the standerd that websites need, or hardware decoding, though that one is a little bit more odd, as it should do software decoding or something.
@@mathman056925 years old, but hey, time flies for me too. Doesn't seem that long ago to me either.
@@vaelxn
I wonder if it could have used GDrive and GMail, displayed text documents and played mp3 files at least.
I'm fascinated by these small and efficient versions of Linux. I started as a UNIX admin in the 80s working on Sun-2 machines with a blazing 10MHz 68010 and (if I was lucky!) 4MB of RAM. Now I work on machines with 2TB of RAM, and 96 cores, etc. I look back and I'm amazed at how we were able to run not only UNIX but window managers and applications like FrameMAker on those systems.
This is why I love your channel; not everything has to be new and shiny to be useful, or just plain fun.
Yeah but you didn't have incompet...err..."more women in tech"
@@JPs-q1o There are also more libraries made by somebody who thinks "I can do better" and over time everything gets more bloated because of people wanting more features instead of focusing on simplicity. That is what I visibly see in old UNIX vs new kernels.
@@JPs-q1o youre so funny and cool 😍
@@JPs-q1oWhat on Earth does your misogyny have to do with anything that was said?
@@nikkiofthevalley it looks as if he is making fun of the people who say these things
I'm most impressed with how well TinyCore managed to handle that old things graphics. Usually when I try to run Linux on really old machines like that I get a lot of graphical errors, or even worse incorrect gamma.
xf86config _shudder_
I mean I can imagine when it gets THAT old. Anything past 15-20yrs w/stuff like that would be impressive IF it did work w/out issues. Since I know every now and then they do purge the kernel of stuff that people aren't using in good enough quantities to justify dev work to keep it working. That's if it's just not straight up deprecated for years XD
0:33 the best computers (and cars) are FULLY depreciated. I like my computers and my vehicles at the intersection of scrap metal prices and questionable mechanical integrity.
There's depreciation, but then there's gaining clutch as an antique or kitsch or historical artifact...
It's always nice to see Linux distros succeed at the time honoured tradition of reviving old hardware. That Firefox experience on the Thinkpad was actually remarkably passable
No kidding. It will blowup trying to play video but basic tasks like checking email, news and listening to music would be all good. I'm still using a PC I built in 2009 which has a second life after installing Linux on it. Entreprise editions of Lenova are classics and built to last. My crap hp, sony laptops died just because it can.
I wonder if Google Chrome would work better.
I sold a Dell D420 on ebay in 2023, a very small laptop, same year release as the Thinkapd x60. I got it from work as it was in a pile of stuff to be discarded. It had XP professional installed; I recall I was able to install Chrome and play youtube videos on low resolution with it. I was surprised with how well it actually worked. Not only that, it seemed like quite a sturdy, compact laptop in general. I am not much of a computer expert, never did these linux installs, but I was able to download Chrome to XP using internet Explorer. The size of the ThinkPad seems to be more similar to the Dell D820 though, and as far as I can tell, it would also be able to play videos using chrome on XP.
Granted, the modern web is a nightmare and realistically Firefox will perform the same way regardless of your beautifully optimized system.
@ You can only really go so far obviously, but for a lot of uses, it's absolutely workable
i put mint on my 2006 (i think) hp pavillion and it can do 480p without stuttering or lag on youtube its pretty neat
I was a big TinyCore Linux user 2010-2014, and developed some from-scratch FLTK-based apps and published them in the repo. Glad TC is still going and being useful!
Thank you for your contribution!
To be fair DSL and PuppyLinux were doing this long before TinyCore, back in the day PuppyLinux had a 50MB variant that had Mozilla in the images, it also ran just fine on 64MB ram machine in the main version.
Someone did a project where they got PuppyLinux packaged up with a multi-os QEMU.
I put it on a USB stick and carried around an OS to do my homework on.
Just plug the stick into the college library PC, double click the QEMU and in a few seconds I had a puppylinux window where I could run any app I wanted instead of just the pre installed stuff the school had
I remember when Puppy came out; I had fun installing it on some "lesser" hardware. I wonder if anyone has worked on an ARM version. . Nope. At least not according to DistroWatch.
*fair, DSL
*TinyCore. Back (to fix your comma splice run-on)
*day, PuppyLinux
*images. It
*on a machine with 64 MB in
Pretty sure Tiny Core (TC) is actually made by one of the previous developers of Damn Small Linux (DSL).
God I loved DSL. I burned a CD with it and a ton of games and took it to school. Good times.
1:19 That's not a stick of RAM, that's a stick of RM
It's a rather obscure format called "MICRODIMM". This specifically is a 144pin pc100/133 MICRODIMM, which saw use in many 90's subnotebooks. The format itself got a 172pin update in the early 00's, that came in DDR and ddr2 flavorings. Later there was a 214pin version that was exclusively ddr2. No idea what these later ones wouldve been used though.
Random Access Memory 🚫
Random Memory ✅
> stick of RM
You mean it belongs to Kim Nam-joon? 😏
@@kFY514 Nah, I thought it was the Malaysian Ringgit
heh.
i have one of these laptops, i think the reason you are missing the usb ribbon cable is that by default the cable runs over the hard drive. whoever upgraded the stock hard drive (either 6 or 12GB IIRC) probably removed it and never bothered putting it back.
You had me at "computing at the lowest point of the depreciation curve" instasub.
Sean, pro tip - don’t use vinegar if you ever need to neutralize acids.
for sure !baking soda works well
Yah, I figure that's an alkaline battery -- in which case vinegar (a weak acid) might well be neutralizing the alkaline (base) leakage.
Went straight into the comments for this.
"Vinegar neutralizes the acid" Aghhhhhhhhhhh my pedant's brain is in PAIN
Vinegar is used to neutralize the base salts from a leaking alkaline battery. I frequently use a tiny amount (on a Q-tip) of lemon juice myself.
I tried TinyCore on a MSI Wind U100. It's a small netbook with an intel Atom cpu. My experience was spot on with your ThinkPad. It used 120mb with wifi enabled. The TinyCore software repo was quite extensive but I found the installation and persistence a bit cumbersome. In the end I went with AntiX. It had a more normal window manager and only used 85 with wifi and conky running. I installed Apache and PHP and served pages with only 135mb.
I just tried to install AntiX yesterday to revive a old laptop and it works fine in live mode, but it just refuse to boot after being installed in a harddisk, just pases the Grub like others Linux system but then get stuck in a black screen, like it is waiting for something to boot.
Now i gonna try Puppy Linux.
Back in the day, I had several tiny Atom netbooks. I swapped in an SSD and ran Gentoo. Even with the compiling, it worked great. So you don't really need an ultra lightweight distro on these systems.
Unlock all those (cryptographically, AFL) broken old WiFi features to get full use of it, lol.
Nevermind, I just solve the problem, its looks like was a kernel thing, I donwloaded a newer(6.x.x) and older(4.x.x) kernel from software manager and while the most recent do the same the older one boot without problems.
Oh snap, thanks for the shoutout! Looks like it’s a lot smoother on a PII 300MHz lol.
Strange as it may seem to some people , vinegar , being a solution of acetic acid , can not neutralise acids.
That would require a basic compound such as sodium bicarbonate.
btw , leaving acetic acid underneath SMD components does not bode well for future reliability
The CMOS battery is alkaline chemistry not acid. So it works. But no you're totally right, acid doesn't neutralize acid.
@@prestonbrownyeah people call it "battery acid" when quite often it's really a battery *base*
Yup should wipe that with Aqua Distillate or IPA
@@dead-claudia depends on the battery. in car batteries, it's absolutely an acid, it's sulfuric acid.
@@dead-claudia it's quite based actually huh
I've been using Puppy Linux for years at work... had never heard of Tiny Core Linux.
And you are so right, those old thinkpads were awesome.
Since their inception, I have ALWAYS thought these were called Toshiba Protege. Hearing you say Portege out loud just broke my brain.
Lol...me too, until i saw "Portege" printed there on the computer. I guess it was their play on portable ;-)
just a tip: there is a thing called plop boot manager - you can install it on the internal drive and it will allow you to boot from usb or cd even on devices where the bios doesn't support it directly. amazing tool.
Videos like this made me a collaborator via youtube membership! You're awesome, this is just what I've been doing to my old computers, since my AMD Duron from 2001, which now needs a motherboard recap. Keep the videos rolling!
Im using Tiny Core for almost 2 years now to run XPenology on a Dual Xeon E5-2699R Server.
How much power does it consume?
@@NoName-rl3fh It consumes 220W continously while Mining Monero and running several LXC's and VM's in Proxmox.
So interesting. What does the "R" suffix mean? I've seen A and C and heard of a P variant too but not R. Different max wattage or boosted cores?
@ It's the same 22 Cores as the A model but only a lower base frequency(2.2GHz instead of 2.4GHz) for better power consumption. The turbo frequency is the same(3.6GHz)
Same as I used TinyCore to make a bootloader for a Synology NAS with a dual core processor with 8 GB memory
how dare youtube hide this from me for 3 minutes!!
By his logic you could just scroll on over to it in dillo! LOL
how abt 7hourz
On the other hand, TH-cam keeps nagging me to watch this Video.
Is this the new meme after "4 views in 6 seconds, bro fell off"?
0:31 0:34 0:36
My last place used a custom tiny core for network booting. Was fantastic. I think Seagate even uses it for some of their flashes.
That X60s truly is beautiful.
The X60s is a great computer. I have one with Void Linux and it can still be used for everyday tasks. It can be a little bit slow when loading big webapps, or require some workaround like yt-dlp to play TH-cam videos smoothly, but I really enjoy using it.
4:12 I know you probably know what you're doing, but to anyone else who might not: vinegar does NOT neutralize acids - it is an acid itself. You neutralize acids with bases and vice versa. However, "battery acid", or what we commonly call the thing that comes out of them when they leak, isn't always an ACID. It actually depends on the type of battery. In the most common kind of non-rechargeable battery - alkaline, the electrolyte is actually a BASE, so vinegar would neutralize it. This isn't the case with carbon-zinc or zinc-chloride batteries for example, which do in fact contain an acid electrolyte. Those could be neutralized with baking soda dissolved in water instead.
Vinegar (pH 2,5) is a different pH value than the lithium (pH 12) that is leaking and therefore indeed diluting the leaked lithium.
If you want people to be able to see the screen better, all you need to do is dark in the room behind the display.
The camera is compensating for the light behind it, and making the screen annoyingly dark.
now I wanna see tiny core OS on minimum required specifications lol
Tiny Core Specs: requires at least 46 MB of RAM to run, with a recommended configuration of 128 MB of RAM and a Pentium II CPU. The system primarily runs in RAM to enhance its operating speed and can boot from a CD-ROM, pendrive, or hard drive.
If this is a standard pitch ribbon cable missing, one of those white blue ones with silvery conductors, you can just order one to size! If they don't have the correct pin count, just take a wider one and cut off some pins at the ends. You can also often recover a fitting cable from a dead optical drive.
These old laptops, like the X61, are very well built. It is a very good experience typing and writing texts on IBM laptops. This, combined with the use of the TrackPoint, makes the user experience very good. The only major obstacle we face nowadays with these older laptops is that web pages have become full of very heavy content with trackers and ads, which makes it impractical to use browsers.
Pi-Hole would knock off some of the workload of blocking ads from the computer. Umatxrix and Ublock with javascript on a whitelist basis would also reduce how much crap gets loaded.
And...in new Thinkpad generation no more trackpoint. Innovation of Lenovo.😢
@@HidgRa I miss that thing, I find trackpads insufferable and the Trackpoint made it... less bad.
It drives me crazy that the only laptops still being made with good keyboards are the "Anniversary" line lenovo laptops. They only make a couple of them, they only release them once every five years, and they all sell out INSTANTLY. You'd think that would be a sign to either make more of them, or release them every year. But alas nope. You'd think *any other* laptop manufacturer would take the hint, but nope. Why are all laptop keyboards so bad now. I want that toshiba, but with updated ports/motherboard/etc.
Laptops have been "phone-ified" where now you're expected to buy a new one every year or two, just like practically every other piece of 'tech' nowadays.
The first laptop I ever had was a little Toshiba with two 1.44MB floppies: I think it ran DOS rather than Windows. What I do remember was the keyboard, which was superb--as good as a really good portable typewriter and, if my memory serves me well, better than a T420. _O tempora, O claviaturae!_
Look into the MNT Reform or MNT Reform Next, which are modern open hardware laptops with actual mechanical keyboards (Kailh Choc switches), and in the case of the MNT Reform, a trackball.
Planned obsolescense is a design requirement in this disposable world.
@@devkev3467the MNT Reform is a cool project but hardware wise it's hard to take seriously as an actual working machine
4:00 oh the battery gore! [edit: wow, amazing you got a useable Linux and browser going]
Dillo is HTML+CSS only, no ECMAScript capability of any kind. I keep it installed for reading HTML documentation but that's about it!
Folks might be interested in the Vanilla DPUP project which is a derivative of Puppy Linux that can install & manage software directly from the Debian repos via apt. Also fully compatible with Flatpak (just install the flatpak package as per Debian norm). All the same capabilities described (running entirely from RAM, persistence, etc.) but with easy installation & update of additional software (using tools many Linux users are already familiar with) + access to the massive amount of stuff in Debian (+ flatpak).
Been my live distro of choice for a couple of years now. Get one of those tiny SD to USB adapters > partition an SD card & install VDPUP > boot it up > turn off autosave > customize with everything you want > manually save to 2nd partition and you've got a fully customized & configured OS, that you can carry in your wallet that will boot on anything capable of booting from USB.
Thanks for the info.
Thank you so much for your video! While watching, I noticed that you removed the CMOS battery from this computer. I have the exact same model, and I never even thought that the battery could cause such corrosion. So, I opened the cover where the mouse is, under which the hard drive is hidden. I carefully cut the cable and was able to remove it separately. Then, by unscrewing just one screw from the top case, I lifted the motherboard slightly and pulled out the battery by the remaining piece of wire, without fully disassembling the computer. I also had some corrosion near the CMOS battery connector, but not as much as you had. Thanks a lot for making me think about this! If it weren’t for you, my computer might have died over time.
nice - thanks for showing me how I was supposed to set up Tiny Core Linux on an old 486 server back in the day! I had always gotten to the desktop up and never did manage to figure out what to do with it lol. long live Tiny Core!
Thought I'd just say this: I'm a software engineer and have a modern Dell XPS 9730 and the funny thing is it's probably harder for me to get modern Linux to work on this than older devices. I had to try so many different OSes, Debian, GhostBSD, OpenSuse, etc... and nothing worked. Before being forced to use Ubuntu. You made this look so easy. I especially found the adapters you were using interesting. It seems like you're prepared with just the right tools to work around the limitations of tech. Believe me, I've been there... Modern laptops are becoming similarly limited, with locked-down bootloaders, exotic hardware, and removal of standard ports. Really getting ridiculous these days.
A few decades ago Bill Joy, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, was talking about the then brand-new internet and was asked what would be an optimum speed. He said 1mb would be more than enough(!) My first PC early 90s was a crippled-chip 386 B&W video. Ran bootleg Borland C/C++, Turbo C, Pascal, etc. Bought 16m of black market RAM for $600 just to install bootleg first-gen WinNT. Friends from UDub could get the first Linux running on it, but without XWin graphics. Clawed my way into the IT world and landed a programming job in the latter 1990s where we ran SCO Unix on Pentiums. So yeah, these videos for me are like a film buff watching _Casablanca_ and _The Wizard of Oz._
That and Puppy Linux.
They're astonishing.
Also, surely it would have been easier to scrounge for the ribbon to get the USB working?
I have Puppy Linux installed on my thumb drive. I use it as a rescue disk for my laptop in case if the main OS suddenly fails to boot and I have to pull as many remaining files as possible from my laptop (even though I have backed all the files from my laptop to my external hard drive every day, I still need that in case of an emergency)
I randomly typed 54pin ribbon cable into ebay and there were a lot of choices to pick from. So yeah getting that working seems like a no brainer if the keyboard could be fixed.
amen, also Knoppix and Slax are often used by technicians to check for hardware failure outside of usually windows OS and access/save data from system drives.....have not tried kolibri os yet, it did not run on an asus eee netbook /got black screen only/ and have not tried it since than
@@RikkiCattermole And if not... you'll have a USB port you can use, so win-win.
Your videos mean the world to me. They feel like therapy for my troubled soul. You are truly wonderful. Thank you for everything you do!
I bet KolibriOS would fly on these machines
Fly like a G6? 😂
@@cameronbosch1213 popping bottles in the ice like blizzard
I bet it would
It would. I had the predecessor MenuetOS booting off a 3.5" diskette on my old Pentium 200 when I was still in 6th grade and it ran fine.
@Hallinwar When we drink we do it right getting... (I don't drink alcohol btw.)
Can’t believe WiFi worked on that. Brilliant video. Tempted to put tinycore on my x280, aesthetic reminds me a little bit of windows 3.1.
I'd really love for operating systems to be this lightweight again. The internet does not need to be as bulky as it is. So many things sacrifice performance for aesthetic. I wish it wasn't that way everywhere.
There is just something about those old lcd screens… the shine, the gentle colours… so good… can’t quite put my finger on it.
Oi! Don't you dare put your finger on it or I'll break your finger. These screenwipes aren't free, y'know :))
CMOS battery leaking .... USB to MB cable missing ... Oh Oh! CardBus to USB to the rescue! Words I never thought to hear
TinyCore is awesome, I had the pleasure to contribute to the official book. Thanks for sharing your experience with it.😊
Lovin' that Hoovie's Garage t-shirt.
I actually have that exact same Toshiba laptop model that is fully functional sitting in my closet, plugged in and charging.😀
I still have all of the accessories such as the external dock with NIC, external CD-ROM that i upgraded to a DVD-RW mechanism, and external floppy drive.
Like yours, my internal drive is running on an SD card.
I have it running a very heavily modded version of Windows 98 SE with XP kernels to run some Win XP apps.
I mainly keep it around for my tons of DOS games and Win9x games.
That Thinkpad with a XFCE-based desktop and the Chicago95 theme would be BEAUTIFUL 😍
There is also very nice Windows 2000 -like theme for IceWM.
Or maybe FVWM95.
@@alexandrecouture2462 Can you share the names of them?
@@Sithhy Type ''windows 2000 theme for icewm'' on Google and you will find it.
This is my first time watching your channel and i'm so amazed that you found so much actual functioning retro hardware. I see other retro guys pulling their hair out finding retro stuff, working stuff i mean.
I was just telling my brother a couple of days ago that he should get one of these Toshibas (or the slightly faster 7000 series)! Used to have one in the early 2000s when I was at university...the best feature was the infrared port that I could use to beam my essays straight to the library printer and not have to pay to print 😂. I just ran Windows on my Toshiba but did use Tinycore on a similar machine (think it was a Sony Vaio) not so long ago and ran it as my main OS on a weird laptop that had a Tillamook processor in it.
That sounds like the standard oversight on library print systems.
4:12 vinegar IS the acid, it dissolves salts that are produced by rust and maybe neutralizes the basic liquid that is electrolyte
nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) and nickel-cadmium (NiCd) batteries in old laptops are very basic.
@halcyonacoustic7366 well, yeah, hence the vinegar or other acid to pause the process
Excellent. That's exactly how it runs on old PC's.
Thanks!
1:37 Roll credits
Wdym
@@MikhaKey CinemaSins joke. Something that comes up whenever someone in the movie says the title of the movie
I used that Portege with DSL many moons ago, still amazed it could run a ray tracer, browse the web, track satellites, give you a star map, compile programs in C, ..... Still one of the coolest laptops made...
Was that RAM or Chiclets?
Thing is ribbon cables are kinda simple, just count how many pins and the distance (pitch) in mm. Input those values on DigiKey and approximate length you may need. I was able to fix a ham radio transciver that had a bad cable that way.
This looks like AmigaOS Linux edition in concept
The algorithm sent this my way. This is perfect for some laptops I have from the same era as that ThinkPad. Knowing that I can use them as simple browsers and likely RDP client (which I assume is in the app store) would be GREAT.
Plus, I have a few ancient towers in my shed (late 90s-00s). If I can turn those into functional web surfers, I'd give them away on Craigslist rather than taking to the dump.
Great demo... SUBBED!
I remember around 2017 I ran Tiny core Linux and DSL (Damn Small Linux on my pentium3 machine for 2 years good times
I have a bunch of old laptops from all my family members piling on a corner at home. The oldest is a Toshiba Satellite running Windows XP. I wanted to do something with it long ago. This is awesome!!! Thanks!!!
vinegar neutralizes the base, not acid
Vinegar (acid) mixes with the alkaline salt crystals (copper hydroxide (base)) to make copper acetate and water. If you use an excess of vinegar, then use some baking soda to neutralize it. flush it with water and ipa.
Amazon uses tiny core for their thin clients. It’s cool that a corporation is using something as simple as tiny core to run a facility
Vinegar is not neutralising any acid. It may dilute a stronger acid, but it is an acid itself. Either it is not helping, something not just related to pH is going on, or the stuff you are cleaning off is a base/alkaline.
6:10 “doesn’t work like any other Linux out there”… what you mean apart from Puppy Linux or any of it’s many derivatives?… @Action Retro
I would say Damn Small Linux which started all this but that’s been defunct for a while.
The original DSL is defunct, but it's been revived in 2024. It's not as small as it used to be (went from 50 mg sto 700mgs), and is now based on Debian/AntiX, but it's a pretty nice lightweight distro.
I'm using CatchyOS for my Thinkpad X130e, and it runs great on this old kit. CatchyOS is a bit easier to use than straight Arch, but you still need some command line experience in Linux to get around the rough spots. Bohdi , Puppy and AntiX are also nice lightweight alternatives for real old devices.
@ that’s interesting thanks, I’ll have to give CatchyOS & the new DSL a look.
I managed a couple hundred of these on Windows NT. They were rock solid as long as no one plugged anything into the port replicator.
I just put AntiX on my X201 earlier this week. That laptop is just meant for running Obsidian for my journaling and occasionally looking something up online, it isn't intended for gaming since I just wanted it as a distraction-lite writing machine.
mentioned below, but puppy linux is the bomb too on not so ancient machines running from ram so lightning fast on older machines
Wow, just what I needed. And it just works. Installed it on my eeepc 2g surf and got it running and installed within 15 minutes. Runs like a champ. Thanks.
Those eee where nice!
Somewhere in my junk I might actually have the port replicator for that thing. I used to deploy this with a wireless card with a wireless hand-mounted bar code scanner for inventory management in a now-defunct little chain of hardware store in the US Pacific Northwest. It was an amazing innovation for the time...not quite handheld, but cheaper by far than the fancier scanners available back then.
I don't remember the name of the wireless LAN gear back then, before any other actual wlan standard really took off. High-gain antennas ftw in the variety of buildings we occupied.
This would have been a beautiful option since our inventory management system was CLI terminal-based to SCO Unix.
Ah good old Mistake Edition lol
IBM Thinkpad T40, i use to fix those machines for a small company years ago. Brings back good memories.
Oh Sean vinegar is also asidic why you said neutralize acid with vinegar? 😅
I think in most of the cases the battery is actually alkaline
@felipekfcosta i guess you're right.
@@felipekfcosta But he said "vinegar neurtalizes the acid" which is bullshit
Love your videos! Suggestion: try running your thanks to patreon supporters on the bottom like a news ticker starting really early in the video at a reasonable speed. This way it's both easier to read and it doesn't feel like end credits that people would close the video at the start of
3:08 That what she said.
Excellent timing - I've got an old Dell Inspiron P11 266 with 144MB RAM and had reached the same conclusions about putting TCL on it, M-Sata to replace the IDE/PATA HDD et al. Need to track down a PCMCIA WiFi card...Nice to see it all working as I can confidently proceed now!
ah yes. linux
i have been summoned
LTT!
The computer gets a little Linux, as a treat
I am obsessed with this little notebook, I have 4 on my collection but sadly 2 of them started showing lcd delamination. Also if left too long with no internal cmos battery sometimes the bios gets corrupted, rendering the pc unbootable 😢, I already lost one this way. Be aware the cmos battery is rechargeable but only if the laptop is on. Power supply connected only doesn’t charge the cmos battery.
Wouldn't a BIOS chip in sch an old laptop be fairly simple to replace? Even if it's soldered in, I bet it's a through-hole device that can be replaced reasonably easily. A lot of BIOS chips are for sale on Ebay, worst case scenario you can't find one with the right BIOS loaded and you buy a fresh chip of the same type and a flasher and just need to get a copy of the BIOS to flash it with, such as from a working laptop's BIOS chip if not found online. Or maybe my bet is wrong and it's not through-hole and it'll take a little more equipment and skill.
Before anti-repair was thoroughly baked...err...soldered in.
TinyCore is pretty remarkable. I was able to use it on my ancient Toshiba Satellite Pro 440 CDX with only 80MB of ram and an original Pentium CPU to get wifi, a modern kernel, and working graphical env. We even managed to start quake 1.
Slick as hell! The speed and relative compatibility makes this a very compelling argument for repurposing this old tech instead of melting it down...
I just learned how those ribbon cables are rated and stuff and now I have been buying them to fix some laptops that either are missing or are broken
tiny core linux is good but you know what's even more optimized for old pieces of crap? compiling linux from scratch (not actually LFS, but just planning everything yourself)
Not gonna lie, I expected the system to completely freeze when you loaded up Firefox. Amazing that it didn't!
Tinycore is wild stuff. I do most of my work on Mint XFCE, which works amazingly on "older" stuff from a decade ago. Tinycore is on another level though. running on 128mb RAM is unreal.
you know what would be magic? actually being able to see youtube videos on this device.
Another cool time with old tech. I was waiting for the ThinkPad to shutdown during the outro because of the battery only lasting a few minutes.
Neofetch isn’t being maintained anymore, fastfetch is a better alternative thats still being maintained
What issues have you run into personally using neofetch as of late?
@ the reason I use fastfetch, it’s slow
I've been using Puppy Linux for 20yrs. Also supported it for years. It also runs in memory, I've never installed it, its been my daily driver for 20yrs. I use a usb stick to boot and remove it after, no hard drives installed , 100% in memory, But I do have some hard drives that I keep for packages, media, pic's etc on , never install . For things I want to remembered I copy it over to the hard drive, then delete the original and system link the copied one on the hard drive back to root things like files in ./config Browser data is usually about all I need to copy and save takes 2 seconds. That way, if the power goes out, the data is saved, the rest is 100% new and in memory :)
Who's here in 2025
I wasn't expect it will go fast and can access some websites. so great!
My first laptop was a Fujistsu P1120. No cddrive, and couldn't boot from USB. I had to install a live Linux to the harddrive, boot it, and then install it to the harddrive. I remember always needing to get the kernel to find the root partition to boot from, so I think I must've been installing the ISO files to the harddrive and creating a grun for it, instead of dd'ing it. It was also convoluted and a bit of a balancing act. Every distro had its own challenges.
The lightweight distros like Puuppy and Slitaz ran best. Gnome2 distros could barely run, some were too modern and needed newer cpu features. My favorite was Vector Linux (based on Slackware) running Xfce4.
Thank you for sharing this. Wasn't aware there existed an actual web browser capable of running on this hardware.
Nice memories. I was lucky to have owned the Portege 3020, 3110 and top-of-the-notch 3490ct models. I had the port replicator add-on including an optical drive, lots of funny and expensive stuff like PCMCIA ISDN and SCSI adapters. That was 20 years ago, I still love these sleek and tiny little machines. These days a HP Elitebook 820 is part of my zoo. 😁
love it, u have so much "ancient" tech, pcmcia interfaces!! who knew they would be useful again. i reember looking tha protoge, thinking, "i cant afford that"
I still love my X61s form factor. I know there has been some motherboard upgrade boards, but I never did them.
This reminds me a lot of making Puppy Linux work on a small machine. On some of its early versions you could have it not copy into RAM and run slowly from the hard drive but use two compressed files on the hard drive and only keep this sessions changes in RAM. Each time you shut down it would modify one of the compressed files with the changes.
Sick background on that ME install too, as a kid I would have been ecstatic to get that at that time.
I had one of these and sold it recently on eBay as I wasn't using it. For half a second I thought this one was mine, despite not selling it across the pond lol
I have one of these little buggers. Used to have two but i scrapped one for parts. They're quite nifty, if not a bit of a pain to mess with without the docks
Always interesting content. I always enjoy your creative work arounds when you encounter hardware obstacles.