Many years ago, when I was still working for -Micron Computer, Inc.-, no that was before the merger, -Micron Electronics- oops that’s -MicronPC-, no, no -MicronPC.com- ok… well now I guess it’s MPC, I helped my sister–in-law get a Micron GoBook. It was a great notebook—lightweight, good keyboard, respectable graphics. Of course that was late 1997. She just upgraded her Pentium 233MHz “great-granny GoBook” for a new Toshiba Celeron 2.4GHz based system for about ⅓ of what the employee discounted GoBook cost back in 1997. After customizing and testing the Toshiba, I took it with us to New York when we went to see her. Now, back in Mystic, I have “great-granny GoBook” beside my Toshiba.
First task was to back up the system across to a networked drive. I had forgotten how small the hard drives were back then — there is a whopping 2 GB(GigaByte) drive in there. I have more storage in my camera now than that—and that’s on a Compact Flash card! Of course at the time this was close to state of the art for laptop designs. After backing everything up, I thought it might be better to load this with linux and use for remote website work than keep Windows on it. Just for grins I decided to try Fedora… The install blew up almost instantly as I suspected it would. I’m sure it would have succeded with the boot: text option, but I wasn’t sure how much effort would be required to get everything running and I chickened out and grabbed the LiveCD I sometimes boot to on the Toshiba—Morphix-Gnome.
It actually booted in, then died quietly when the CD spun down. The old CD in here is only 2x and it takes some time to spin up and down. Once it spun down from inactivity it couldn’t spin up fast enough for Morphix which would race off with error messages followed by a “we’ll retry in 5 minutes”. Of course 5 minutes later the drive had spun down and couldn’t revive fast enough to prevent the loop from restarting. Unfortunately I had no console access, and the CD drive was locked shut so I couldn’t pre-empt the loop.
I decided to give it another try for some reason, and this time it made it into the Gnome desktop. Not snappy, but it worked. After minor tweaking I was able to access the network, browse a few sites and log in to a couple SSH and SCP sessions. Although it was not originally in my plans, about an hour ago I launched the “Install to Drive” script on the Morphix desktop. After partitioning the spacious drive, it reported that it was copying packages and that it would take 5–20 minutes depending on the computer speed. I guess they figured there aren’t many 2x CD drives still in use out there…
I doubt I’ll keep Gnome installed, as it tends to like more memory and CPU power than this little notebook can really give it. At least the core Debian will be installed on there, and I can see what I can get away with. Already though, even running off a LiveCD, it was far snappier than it was under Windows. I’d be interested to hear from anyone else still using a GoBook, and what they are running—I didn’t test out the sound or a number of other things—any tips as what you’ve found to work well would be greatly appreciated.
Update 28 Jan. 2004:
The Morphix HD-Installer never did succeed in getting past about 56%. I think it comes down to the same issue – drive speed and the fact that this old laptop drive takes quite some time to spin up to that blazing speed. I did get Debian installled from CD source, even that took 4 attempts through the installer to get all the packages—all the ones I selected that is, about 500 MB unpacked— successfully installed and configured off the CD’s. The good news is it’s up and running with net access. Much snappier response in X11 than Windows 95 or 98—might be some life left in ‘Great–Granny-Goobook’ yet.
