[SOLVED] Installing 12.20 on elderly laptop

business_kid · 12-04-2023, 06:39 AM

I have anelderly Samsung NP350C laptop. It seemed it was their first generation with uefi because it was a pig. I formatted with fdisk, set the Bios to legacy, and used it as a pre-uefi pc. Fine with Slackware.

I do have 25G meant for another OS. I failed to install linux Mint on it. Now I'm trying with the Debian-12.2 netinst-iso. That's not seen as a bootable usb device

.

I have grub on this, and can hack something together, but it just won't go near all that mess of directories that efi is. Here is the disk layout

Code:

bash-5.1$ lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda      8:0    0 223.6G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0   500M  0 part /boot
├─sda2   8:2    0     5G  0 part [SWAP]
├─sda3   8:3    0    40G  0 part /
├─sda4   8:4    0     1K  0 part 
├─sda5   8:5    0    50G  0 part /home
├─sda6   8:6    0    25G  0 part 
└─sda7   8:7    0 103.1G  0 part /mnt/virtual

sda6 had Mint-19.? on it, but I couldn't update it to Mint-20. Alternatively, if any other distro has package management and a half decent repo, I'll try it. It has to handle a 100% legacy system, though. sda7 is a sort of overflow space for whatever weird thing is going on an any point in time.

hazel · 12-04-2023, 07:02 AM

I haven't used Debian for quite a while but Debian Bookworm might well be UEFI only. AntiX is the distro usually recommended for old hardware as it doesn't need a lot of memory or disk space.

business_kid · 12-04-2023, 09:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hazel

I haven't used Debian for quite a while but Debian Bookworm might well be UEFI only. AntiX is the distro usually recommended for old hardware as it doesn't need a lot of memory or disk space.

Does it have

Much of an external repo?
any significant number of devs?

I don'ty want to end up where I get a problem, and nobody has the answer.

EDIT: What's the significance of elogind or the other login setup?

hazel · 12-04-2023, 10:55 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by business_kid

Does it have much of an external repo?

AntiX mostly uses the Debian repos, so it has access to anything that's in the current Debian stable release. However it does its own builds of anything that's systemd-dependent in Debian such as cups.

Quote:

EDIT: What's the significance of elogind or the other login setup?

Packages that have been built to depend on systemd can generally use elogind instead. That's what Slackware does. But istr that Anticapitalista told me AntiX doesn't use elogind, it uses special systemd-free builds.

The development team is quite small which isn't a problem for me but might be for you.

business_kid · 12-04-2023, 11:13 AM

Well, it's going in, largely on the systemd-free feature.

It also seems to have some knowledgable users. This is the opposite of RPi OS, where the majority seem to be help vampires. When RPi OS has a problem, the questions are many, but the answers are lacking.

business_kid · 12-04-2023, 01:40 PM

Well, this is solved.

Antix is installed & running. Debian wouldn't install, and neither would Antix initially, because I was pressing the wrong key for a boot menu in the Samsung BIOS. After a few years of not fiddling with this laptop, I can forgive myself that lapse. That said, I'll mark this solved and play with setting it up later.

Thanks for the replies & suggestions.