My Dad gave me an old laptop he found in the rubbish and I am trying to breathe new life into it, with Blender.
Unfortunately, I’m a bit stuck and am also a bit out of my depth! Therefore, I appeal to my fellow Blenderers for help!
It’s a Toshiba Satellite Pro 4300 series and it came with Windows 98 and loads of other stuff on it. I decided that I’d format the hard drive and install linux on it and run Blender. I haven’t used Linux before.
When formatting the hard disk it said something about recovering areas?!?
I tried Ubuntu but this took ages to install and then froze. I tried Xunbuntu and the same thing happened.
I tried Damn Small Linux and although I can run it from the disk I cannot partition the HD to properly install it. I tried to use cfdisk as per the instructions and got a FATAL ERROR: Cannot find the drive (or something).
I have since installed freeDOS but cannot use chkdsk to see if the HD is damaged. I run it and it says FAT32 not currently supported. Scandisk is a bad command.
I’ve tried to partition with Fdisk but it says ‘No space to create a DOS partition’.
This is everything I know. I’ve totally run out of ideas.
I know the system has a 10GB hard disk and 128MB of RAM but I don’t know the processor speed. I have tried to boot stuff from the floppy but it just throws up errors so I think the drive is broken.
if you are still stuck, try to find a computer place around your home that offers free diagnosis. I have a place that offer this near my home and used that to help figure out what was wrong with my computer once before.
P.S. I like the Blender3D interface of your site I don’t think I have seen anything like that before.
have you tried any of live distros?
you can boot those from cdrom and they dont install anything on your machine, so you can atleast check it works ok… and then move on to installation.
I don’t think it’s worth it. It sounds just like my IBM Thinkpad (the old kind with Pentium II and 128 megabytes of RAM), and Blender won’t run smoothly from a blank grid on that stupid thing. I wouldn’t even try it if I were you.
I just thought it might be useful for simple stuff. Most of my stuff is low poly anyway?!?! Plus, I can use it as an extra renderer or to look good on my desk showing my latest animation!
Well, a simple cube running across the screen in 50 frames runs at 0.5 frames per second while showing the animation in Blender’s 3D veiw. People who don’t know it’s such an old laptop will think it’s Blender’s fault.
Elye_Ball: try opensuse. It’s great and very easy to install, either for newly formatted drives or for drives with winxp already on them; it takes care of the dual boot and everything. Supports 3d acceleration for both Nvidia and ATI cards (usually detects them on install) and blender performs quite well on it. Oh yes, you can pick the desktop also on install process (KDE/Gnome). Only problem: 6 cds to download or 1 DVD. If you got broadband you’ll be ok. http://www.opensuse.org