On 7/16/2013 12:27 PM, Katherine Moss wrote:

Hey there, I just have a quick question. Well, actually two. My first thing is that I have this older Toshiba Laptop with a dead hard drive and dead clock battery (I want to replace both eventually) but I'm not sure about the rest of it's internals. I'd like to use OpenSuSE 12.3 to test it out on a live USB. Will this work with 512 MB of RAM (what is available on the machine, but not the machine's limit) and a 2.0 ghz processor? (It might actually be 1.7, though I'm not sure.) The computer was built in CA. 2005, so do you folks from your experience think that I can use the latest OpenSuSE for this? (the laptop will run Windows 7 for a comparative reference.) Thanks. My next question is as follows. I couldn't get the SuSE studio image writer to write the image, and upon realizing that all that it does is extract the ISO file, I decided to go the manual route and extract it to the drive via 7Zip. Is this enough to make the drive bootable? And then lastly, since I've never used a live environment before, how can I set up the environment so that all it does is boots and loads rather than tried to install on the hard drive? You say on the site "suitable for installation". I'm not trying to install it on the hard drive, I'm trying to run it from the USB drive to test out audio and networking. Thanks. And also, does the gnome live environment come with Orca? Thanks!

You've got a memory challenged computer with no hard drive. You might get a USB install to work, but it would be a lot easier to start with Damn Small Linux. http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/usb.html But why? Depending on the vintage the drive will be either ide (ata) or Sata and cost from $27 op to 85 bucks. (Sata, is newer and cheaper than the older IDE which is getting hard to find). The battery is like $3. You can't even give it away as is, so either junk it or cough up for a new cheap drive and get a little more use out of the old beast. -- _____________________________________ ---This space for rent--- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

Katherine Moss said the following on 07/16/2013 03:27 PM:

Hey there, I just have a quick question. Well, actually two. My first thing is that I have this older Toshiba Laptop with a dead hard drive and dead clock battery (I want to replace both eventually) but I'm not sure about the rest of it's internals. I'd like to use OpenSuSE 12.3 to test it out on a live USB. Will this work with 512 MB of RAM (what is available on the machine, but not the machine's limit) and a 2.0 ghz processor? (It might actually be 1.7, though I'm not sure.) The computer was built in CA. 2005, so do you folks from your experience think that I can use the latest OpenSuSE for this? (the laptop will run Windows 7 for a comparative reference.) Thanks.

I can't answer your second question, but I'd be interested in the answer to that. I can address the first. I have a machine on my desk from the Closet of Anxieties running openSuse 12.3 with an 800MHz chip and 1G of RAM. It has a 20G had drive of which less than half is in use. I'm running XFCE on it, I think that KDE and Gnome would require too much to support the eye-candy. Its fine for reading mail with thunder bird, replying. I don't use firefox on it. It runs - just - in half that memory, but annoyingly slow at the GUI. I've used machines with less power and memory running IPCop as routers/firewalls. The GUI - X - seems too much for them, both CPU and memory hungry. But there are many appliances that can run a nice state machine talking back and forth using a web/html/http interface. Don't dream of using such a machine for gimp or anything like that! -- How long did the whining go on when KDE2 went on KDE3? The only universal constant is change. If a species can not adapt it goes extinct. That's the law of the universe, adapt or die. -- Billie Walsh, May 18 2013 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org