Old Hardware - Part 2

There were a couple of things to finish off before the Linux laptop was ready for use, solving the problem of storage and setting up an internet connection.

Storage was simple. The machine has a 20GB hard drive, of which 6GB had been partitioned to Linux. Once I had a working build, I lowered the Windows partition down to 10GB and created a new partition for scratch data storage.

I also had an HP Pavilion laptop that suffered from overheating. This was a widespread problem and HP patched the BIOS to keep the fan on. However, my machine broke with one of the common symptoms of the WiFi stopping. Incidentally as it was still under warranty HP were great about this and from shipping to return took only about 3 working days. Unfortunately, the underlying problem was still present and about 6 months later the video card broke.

At this point, the machine was out of warranty and I bought a new one (not HP). I did however have a perfectly good 250 GB hard drive. Amazon do pretty cheap 2.5in SATA to USB enclosures so I purchased one of these and got myself a 250GB USB drive.

The next step was to reformat the drive from NTFS to FAT32 so it could be used by Windows and Linux. Windows of course does not easily format FAT32 drives greater than 32GB but by good fortune the EaseUS partition master I used to partition the laptop also formats large drives to FAT32.

Secondly, the Wifi.

2002-era laptops likely didn't come with built in WiFi. Mine at least had a modem! At the time when I first got WiFi I installed a PCI card from BT. This didn't work after the default Lubuntu installation so I needed to set-up the card separately.

Instructions are widespread on the web. First, you need to discover the available PCI devices. The command to do this is:
lspci -vvnn | grep 14e4

From this I determined that the card was a Broadcom BCM4318.

Setting this up offline involves the following steps: 

As this is the b43 chipset install b43-fwcutter from the installation CD.

Next, download firmware files from http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o and http://mirror2.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2 and copy to home (you need to sudo cp)

 Run the following commands:

~$ tar xfvj broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2

~$ sudo b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o

~$ sudo b43-fwcutter --unsupported -w /lib/firmware broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5/driver/wl_apsta_mimo.o

Finally restart the machine.

I now had a working Linux laptop with WiFi and 250 GB of storage available.