Spending a Christmas eve installing Linux on an old laptop

Spoiler

Right before Christmas (here in Germany it's Catholic) I found an old Laptop under the rain. Someone was moving, and some good stuff was on the ground for a day. I searched a little and found a power supply. At home this laptop revealed that it's fully functional Fujutu Amilo La1703:

Not bad, right? Well, for my childhood that was great and you could do just anything with it. But how do we judge devices now? Wi-Fi should work and it should play YouTube. Well, I didn't get that and gave this laptop to my friend to install some old Windows version. Why's that? Well, everything working and not working is described on this Ubuntu page, and I couldn't get any better. The device is so old, that some links from this page don't work.

The process was interesting though because I tried different distributions and they performed surprisingly for me. Some were surprisingly good, some were surprisingly bad. As I'm not religious and Win10 has relatively modest system requirements, I tried to install it as well (several times). If you want to learn about this process and some unexpected outcomes, that's what this post is about.

Linux distributions

For those who don't know, you have 64 and 32-bit options, but not for all the distributions. This laptop supports 64-bit, but as it has 2Gb RAM, a 32-bit distro could fit well. Unfortunately, Fedora (one of my favorites) and Ubuntu don't support 32-bit anymore, so I had to try the 64-bit versions. So, I tried:

The quest was to make this device work:

Regarding graphics, it worked in Debian, but with the wrong resolution. Installing openchrome drivers helped a lot, but I didn't get performance to play YouTube without tearing the video even on the lowest resolution. Fedora installed openchrome at once with the right resolution – great job! Ubuntu couldn't launch X, I played with X11 config a bit – but no luck here even with the openchrome installed. So I didn't move further with Ubuntu.

Wi-Fi is supported on this device on Linux only via ndiswrapper. This means that you find Windows drivers and compile a kernel module to use it. This device has 32-bit and 64-bit Windows drivers, but only 32-bit drivers are supported by ndiswrapper. As Fedora is 64-bit only, I get a "Bad magic" error, when I try to use 32-bit drivers on a 64-bit system. And that's the best result so far, as in Debian I couldn't install ndiswrapper!

No drama connecting to the Internet here, as this laptop is relatively heavy and large, and the battery is dead, it can be used more as a "movable" laptop (like switching off and moving to another location), than as a "portable" or "mobile". And it has an Ethernet port, so I could connect it to my router. By the way, no drivers were required for Ethernet in any distro. If you need a workaround, you could get a Wi-Fi dongle in this case, one Linux supported. They are relatively cheap.

Ok, so how's about sound? Well, it worked exactly as described: very silent and only using the headphones. In Linux you can "overamplify", but the sound quality suffers. The pleasant surprise here is that it worked without any effort with PulseAudio. I installed some ALSA tools, but it didn't change anything. OSS drivers (a relic sound system) support this device, but the drivers are so old – I didn't find a way to install them on any system.

Ok, we have Ethernet, and we have some video drivers (without acceleration, by the way). So, what about YouTube? Well, it plays with a tearing. By the way, as Fedora is 64-bit I could install Google Chrome on that and expect a better experience with Google and YouTube sites. On Debian, I could use Chromium. Nevertheless, YouTube is unusable in any distro or browser. Maybe digging a bit more into video acceleration could fix this, but openchrome drivers are not developed and the website with VIA Linux video drivers is not here anymore.

You can install LXDE and have a nice desktop experience though. And with Fedora Google Chrome works fine, as well as any other 64 bit modern apps. Ok, let's move on to Windows.

Win10 installation experience

As this laptop passes Win10 requirements and I had quite a positive recent experience installing Win10 on a 10-year-old laptop, I decided to give Win10 a try. To optimize performance you could:

Does it start the installation? Well, yes, using one workaround. Did it install? No, I was stuck with the "Just a moment" screen, and some "out of the box experience" (OOBE) errors. I tried different ways: booting into the safe mode, disabling some settings in the registry, and it didn't work. The fun fact though is that Windows struggled with the same wrong resolution issue, which was not present in Fedora. And Windows needed drivers, which were available on the Fujitsu website (great!). But OOBE didn't allow me to finish the installation, so I surrendered after a few attempts. OOBE was quite frustrating.

Final thoughts

Trying to make this laptop work was an adventure for me and I learned a lot. More than that, I felt a kind of nostalgia for playing with it. I started playing with FreeBSD in 1999. Wait... I could try installing FreeBSD on this Fujitsu!

OK, what can you do with it now if it doesn't play YouTube? I don't think working with Google Docs would be a pleasant experience, but on a PC like this or even worse I could type my diploma study and have a PDF using LaTeX.

It's a pity we judge devices by YouTube playing, but that's it. I think it's great that YouTube now possesses lots of free educational resources, so I agree that it's an important use case for entertainment and work.

This laptop could be something like a "typewriter" for someone interested in writing articles (for publishing in PDF or a blog) and... maybe interested in retro-gaming. That's the frontier for this laptop. But the 1 GHz processor... Man, that was fast... At least 15 years ago...

OK, it's not that bad! If you have some more fast computers, you could have:

That was a "happy hacking" experience for sure... Something I miss with everything around "just working" nowadays, ha-ha!