Journal mcgrew's Journal: Ask Slashdot: Using a computer as a peripheral 9
I have an old IBM thinkpad I only paid twenty bucks for; its battery and hard drive are shot, but everything else on it afaik works. I also have a fairly new Acer Aspire netbook. It occurred to me that I could boot into Linux with the IBM using a thumb drive for its hard drive, connect the two computers with a crossover cable, and use the laptop as a DVD/CD burner for the netbook and the netbook for the laptop's storage. The IBM has an S-Video optput, so I could also watch movies stored on the netbook with the TV set using the IBM as an intermediary device.
The netbook is now dual-boot, but there will probably be times I want to use it with Windows.
What distro gets along best with Windows 7 that will run the thinkpad well? Am I going to run into any problems with this setup I haven't forseen?
Dumb Terminal (Score:2)
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Well, the fact that it has a DVD burner is what I want it for, saves me the expense of buying a USB DVD burner. Kind of turms the laptop into a network DVD burner (I'll have to get a new crossover cable, I can't find the one I had). Plus, like I mentioned, it has the S-video jack so if I use it to get netbook content to the TV.
Is the drive controller shot too? (Score:2)
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Seconded, it makes sense to just get another hard drive, they're insanely cheap these days - though if it's PATA rather than SATA that could be an issue, I haven't checked prices on PATA drives recently. Depending on how old it is it may not even have the BIOS capability to boot from a flash drive.
Don't have any experience with trying to specifically interoperate Windows 7 and Linux beyond connecting into a W7 box with RDP (which worked fine), but Ubuntu has been working fine for me in a Windows environment
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Depending on how old it is it may not even have the BIOS capability to boot from a flash drive.
I was in its BIOS last night, and it does have the capability to boot from a network or USB. I'll see tonight after I put Linux on the thumb drive; found a utility to make the thumb drive bootable last night. The netbook's at home DLing Kubantu now. It will definitely boot from a CD, as I put a Mandriva 2005 disk in as a test, and it tried to install it. Of course it couldn't without a hard drive, but at least I k
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IIRC (I'm not at home right now) it's a model 41, but I'm pretty sure it's the drive and not the controller; it makes a nasty clicking sound when trying to boot.
Replacing the drive was my first thought, until I thought of just using it as a DVD burner and TV interface. I haven't checked, but I'll bet the battery is more expensive than the drive. It won't matter that htere's a thumb drive sticking out, as it won't be leaving the shelf anyway.
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Just Googled, The Lenovo site (this machine predates IBM's sale
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So is that a T41? I presume you found the letter part of the model number in order to find it on the Lenovo website. The T-series laptops are quite popular in some circles I run with. Some of them even had discrete graphics capability (rather than the less impressive Intel video chips). Regardless though the HDs are simple; although some of them do require one stupid little trick for an aftermark
Damn small linux or ubuntu server (Score:2)
Either of these is a good distro, or if you have enough memory go for ubuntu desktop. Some people hate it, but I've been pretty happy with it. If memory is a problem, start with ubuntu server and apt-get whatever else you need (including X if you need that, which works fine even if the laptop can't handle the gnome/kde bloat). Though if you all you ever did was use it to burn DVDs, ubuntu server would be fine if you aren't afraid of the command line.
Remote movie watching (Score:1)
I do not know much about command-line / remote CD/DVD burning. Personally, I just use k3b, but for the use-case of never having to interact with the laptop directly, a command-line tool would probably be easier to use.
To share files, any distro should support samba, which should work to watch movies over even on a wireless connection. It would probably be easiest to just setup your netbook's Windows and Linux OSes to show the same samba shares (that might involve making a separate login on both with the sam