Linux on a laptop

This document is about reviving old laptops (or for that matter a workstation) that you have sitting around because Microsoft Windows XP is just too slow. You may have tried to install some of the popular Linux distributions and found them to be as slow as MS Windows XP also and have decided that the old laptop should be replaced or just forgotten on the shelf.

Well hope is here for a revival ... if you have some time and are not too bothered about reading instructions.

I am talking about Gentoo Linux on the old Pentium laptop.

What makes Gentoo Linux different than other Linux distributions is one of the installation methods available is to build the ENTIRE operating system and applications from source. Most operating systems are distributed with binary forms of the executables. These are precompiled by the companies for the common processor type of it's time of release. The current levels of processors are around the 3Ghz level.

This poses a problem when you install these precompiled binaries onto a system that is below those levels. The binaries are taking advantage of a processor level that is far above the old laptop that you have had sitting around since 1997 ... or even 2001.

I had installed SuSE 9.1 on an old PII notebook and found that the Desktop environment (X Windows) was too slow to use ... even Windows 2000 applications ran faster on this same hardware.

When an operating system and it's applications are compiled from the source code it can be configured to match the processor type that it is actually running on ... thus it is optimized for that specific system and will obtain the greatest efficiency.

Below I briefly describe my adventure with Gentoo Linux on my old DEC HiNote Ultra 2000 (yes that's the now defunct Digital Equipment Company) laptop ... also I have included information on Gentoo Linux running on PIII laptops (Compaq Evo N400c and N600c).

Gentoo Linux: www.gentoo.org

About the Gentoo Linux installation process --->

HiNote Ultra 2000 and Linux installation --->

Compaq Evo N400c and N600c notes --->