So here is another frustrating, fun and challenging adventure I undertook. The goal of the project is to use an old laptop (Pentium III, 64mb ram) to create a good enough system that can serve as a portable internet tv. In other words, a box capable of running macromedia flash with sound, and do it wirelessly. Sounds simple enough right? Not when you have an old system.

So the choice of distribution (because of their superiority on old computers) was either DSL (Damn Small Linux) or Puppy Linux. The option of xubuntu has been ruled out because it seems to be less compatible than the above 2 (by that I mean, I can’t even install it, it get stuck on downloading a lib and complains it can’t read the disk. Yes I checked that the disc is working). So after burning many cds, approx. 5, on different distribution (live, installation only, messed up, etc.) I was finally able to get it to work. But not without many problems and lessons along the way.

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So a couple of days ago, I decided my computer was starting to lag too much and I should reinstall it. The original plan was to create a new partition (using my trusty sysresccd which has qtparted. A free hard drive partitioner that can resize ntfs.) on my hard drive to place all my files into and reformat the other partition. Then after reinstalling the OS I would place the file back, then join all the partition back. Sounds great right? On paper it did, but when I went ahead and executed it, a big giant head exploding problem happened. My computer crashed while partitioning. Naturally my first hope was to check if my files was still there, no dice. At that point a part of me died. (more…)

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