I found an old Sony Vaio that has been unused for years. It has an Intel Core 2 Duo P8400, 3 GB of DDR2 RAM, an Nvidia GeForce 9300M, and a 250 GB SATA hard drive. The existing Vista installation appears to be corrupted and will not boot.
I only want to use the laptop for light office work, spreadsheets, and web browsing. I can replace the hard drive with a SATA SSD and upgrade the RAM because there are two memory slots.
So far, I have tried installing antiX and Xubuntu from USB drives created with Rufus. I used MBR and DD image settings, but both installers reach the boot menu and then repeatedly restart. I also tried nomodeset, nouveau.noaccel=1, and blacklisting Nouveau, as well as booting entirely into RAM, but nothing changed.
The Nvidia graphics card seems like the likely problem. Would a different distribution or an older release be more suitable? Is it worth preparing the installer directly on the hard drive using a SATA-to-USB adapter, or should I just install Windows 7 instead?
3 Answers
An older laptop with similar specifications runs well with MX Linux and the XFCE desktop, especially after replacing the hard drive with an SSD. MX is worth trying before giving up, since it is relatively lightweight and friendly to older hardware.
Linux Mint with the MATE desktop is another reasonable option. It is light enough for this class of machine and offers access to proprietary or non-free drivers, while still being able to fall back to a generic graphics driver if necessary. With an SSD and more RAM, it should be perfectly usable for basic browsing, music streaming, documents, and other light tasks.
Thanks, I will try that before resorting to Windows.
A minimal Debian installation could help determine whether the problem is the graphics driver or something earlier in the boot process. Install without a desktop environment first, then add a lightweight desktop such as XFCE with tasksel. It should use the open-source Nouveau driver by default. With only 3 GB of RAM, a lightweight desktop is preferable, although upgrading the memory would help a lot. A text browser such as w3m can also be useful on this hardware, but modern graphical browsing will still be demanding.
I plan to increase the RAM anyway since the laptop has two slots. The installer did not seem especially unhappy with 3 GB, but I will try the minimal-install approach too.
I had not considered MX Linux. I will give it a try. Did you need to do anything special for the Nvidia graphics card?