Making Tanto useful

I finally bought a new battery for my old $60 laptop, to replace the dead one. (That’s why it was so cheap.)

Surely, the laptop must have a even greater use than to beat the heat from my third-floor bedroom while still letting me browse the Internet from the cool downstairs. With the new battery, Tanto is now free to go anywhere I want it to.

I’d like to bring it with me in Japan this October. There’s just one problem: it has a 6GB hard drive and Fedora Core 3, even with the small set of packages installed, it huge for that laptop. It still takes more than half of the space.

So, I decided to install Damn Small Linux on it. The 50MB Debian-based distro is sure fast. I start the laptop, wait just one minute, and it’s ready to be used in X!

Firefox, Gimp, Gaim, Inkscape, word processors, even a Web server. Everything I need is already in there, and it’s surprisingly fast, giving more use for my heavy 64MB-RAM laptop.

Though, there are some problems. I always need to initialise my AirLink(TM) wireless PCMCIA network card manually, which requires a Windows driver and ndiswrapper. Plus, after waking up the computer from sleep, it doesn’t always work, and the PCMCIA controller always stops responding. Also, I’d really like to be able to hibernate. I don’t really care for that feature on a desktop computer, but on a laptop, I think it’s a must! However, I’m really surprised that sound works without flaw right after booting!

Hey, I finally have something to play with during those long rides on the bus!