[ale] Installing Linux on removed laptop drives

[Daniel Howard]

Last nite I also successfully got Xubuntu on an old laptop of mine 
(Toshiba Portege 3110CT, PII, 300 MHz, 192 MB RAM, 6.4 GB HDD, also no 
floppy or CD ROM available) by removing the hard drive, using an HDD-USB 
adapter that Jim recommended to me a while back, and installing Xubuntu 
from CD using my main Fedora/K12LTSP box here in the basement.  Only 
issues I ran into were 1) booting up Xubuntu on the Fedora box and 
installing it to the laptop HDD resulted in corrupting my MBR/Grub 
loader and I had to put CD #1 one of K12LTSP back, check "upgrade" and 
it repaired the MBR/Grub loader just fine.  2) After I installed the 
drive in the laptop, it tried to boot and said "disk does not exist" and 
I finally figured out that it configured GRUB to boot Xubuntu from hd2 
(which it was on the Fedora box), so I figured out how to edit GRUB's 
menu.lst file (Xubuntu uses "mousepad" instead of gedit, plus you have 
to use sudo in Ubuntu, and no, I didn't want to use vi, much as Jim 
forces me to every time I visit him!) and then Xubuntu worked great on 
the old laptop, 12 seconds to load Firefox, 8 seconds to load Abiword, 
and zippy to use.  Plus, this laptop has a dongle that has Ethernet on 
it, and thus could also be used as a thin client.  Definitely a keeper.

I'm now wondering how best to repeat this next time so I don't have to 
repair booting for my Fedora box (maybe I only needed to save the old 
menu.lst first?)  Is there a way to install on a host PC from CD/DVD to 
a USB-connected laptop drive w/o affecting the host box?  If I got a 
batch of similar laptops for GOSEF, I'll learn how to use Clonezilla, 
but for now, I have to try different distros just to see what works best.

Thanks, Daniel

-- 
Daniel Howard
President and CEO
Georgia Open Source Education Foundation