I seem to be one of those individuals that is gifted old hardware from time to time. Most people… normal people… just don’t need or even want an old piece of hardware and generally just toss it. As payment for setting up a laptop with openSUSE for a friend I was given this old bit of hardware that I really don’t need but you just never know when a something might arise to make use for an old piece of kit. Since I didn’t want it just sitting around with a broken installation of Windows 7, I decided to put openSUSE Leap 15.0 on it.
I already had the ISO downloaded and written to a USB Flash drive but in case you want it you can get it here.
Preparing for Installation
Initially this machine was a bit of a tough nut to crack. I was unable to get into the BIOS, it seemed that none of the directions I found would work. On a whim, I decided that I would attach an external keyboard to see if by chance there was a keyboard problem with the laptop; and so it was.
To access the BIOS, upon booting the system, press F2 repeatedly during the “Vaio” Logo splash until you enter into the the important bits of the system. Since this machine is too old for secure boot and only has the legacy boot, I only had to change the boot order to seek the USB Drive first.
Specs that Matter
Not that it really matters but for the edification of those interested:
- Intel Core i3 350M @ 2.27 Ghz (1st Gen)
- 4 GB RAM, 3.5 GB Available after shared video usage
- Graphics Card Intel Core Processor Graphics
- 15.6″ 1366 x 768 Glossy Screen
- 3 – USB 2.0 ports
- 1 – eSATA / USB 2.0 port
- HDMI
- SVGA
- SD Card Reader
- Memory Stick Pro Reader
- and some other things…
Mostly a decent system.
Installation
The installation of openSUSE was rather trivial. I booted up the machine with the installation image, began the process and mostly just clicked through. The only customization I did on the install was to set the partitions the way I wanted:
- Root: 25 GiB
- Swap: 4 GiB
- Home: 264 GiB
I selected KDE Plasma as being my desktop of choice, because, is there really another option?
For more on the installation process, you can go here.
Once the machine was up and running, I installed the multimedia codecs, the terminal way, Falkon Web Browser and I was off to the races. The reality is, for a rather old laptop, it is not too terrible at all. It ran Plasma Desktop rather nicely with only a few moments of lagging here and there due to disk access.
It is probably not far from needing a replacement drive but I will wait until it burns out. This machine isn’t slated for any sort of “production work” in my house. It’s seemingly a fine machine but just doesn’t excite me at all.
I used this machine to help set up my new Edge Device in a kind of test environment for a couple days to test functions with another machine so it very much came in handy to have.
Out of curiosity, I wanted to see how this machine stacked up against my old, trusty, faithful Dell Latitude D630. From cpubenchmark.net, I compared the two CPUs. I am perfectly aware that the CPU is not the only factor in a system’s performance but I was curious.
Interestingly, the Dell Latitude D630 feels more performant than the the Sony Vaio, perhaps due to Dell having more memory or running Tumbleweed, regardless, it was just an observation of which I have to actual empirical data to back it.
So, then I thought, since I have no intention of using this machine as a regular, in production, type machine, I have decided to make this laptop my distro hopping machine. I now have a performance baseline, what I should expect, based on running openSUSE Leap 15.0 with KDE Plasma. It runs much nicer than the Windows 7 it had previously and better than many brand new machines with Windows 10 I have used. I know how a rock solid, sensible, Linux distro feels and now I would like to compare it to other distributions and maybe I can learn something from it.
Final Thoughts
It’s always fun acquiring new hardware, even old busted up hardware is great too. There is something indescribably fun with installing Linux, specifically openSUSE Linux on old or discarded hardware, not to mention new hardware but that doesn’t happen as often.
I am not expecting the hard drive in this machine to hold out very long since it is about nine years old and I plan to do a lot of reading and writing on it. The screen looks okay, the keyboard mostly works and it is just an okay machine.
I am grateful to have received this machine as I now have a purpose for it, my distro hopping machine, I have a good base to which I can make more biased reviews of other Linux distros. I know how this “feels” so now I can compare how other distros “feel”. In my clearly biased view, nothing will be as good as openSUSE, but it’s fun to play.
Further Reading and links and things
https://software.opensuse.org/distributions/leap
Multimedia Codecs and VLC Player
