This post gives brief details on reviving an extremely old Sony Vaio PCG-505TX and loading the Debian net installer via floppy disk
I was recently given an old Sony PCG-505TX, with a monster spec of Pentium 300 MMX and 64MB of RAM. Whilst most phones come with a more powerful processor and more RAM nowadays, you can’t* install Debian on a phone, and the keyboard on the laptop still makes it a winner.
However, with only a floppy disk drive at my disposal, I had limited choices with what distribution to install. Luckily, whilst Debian is no longer released with floppy disk netinst images, the old Etch repo’s still contain them. I’ve uploaded them here in case the etch repo’s are ever dropped.
The old HDD in the laptop had also died, so I decided to replace it with a 10GB relic from an old ThinkPad I had lying around. After removing all the screws from the base of the unit, I was still unable to pry the keyboard away from the shell. After ten minutes of Googling I stumbled upon this site, which gave me the final clue – I needed to remove the ‘hinge caps’ from around the hinges of the monitor.
To do so – you need to apply a fair bit of force, you may think you’re about to break the plastic – but as long as you’re only using your finger(nail)s you shouldn’t worry. Just pry each end of the cap away until it finally succumbs to the pressure. Following that there should be no more screws to unscrew, just lift the keyboard gently away – note that you’ll have to release the clips holding the three ribbon cables in place.
With the new hard drive installed and the floppy images written to disk – I booted up with the ‘boot.img’ floppy inserted. The installation is pretty painless, and it will prompt you for each disk in turn. I had both a PCMCIA 10/100 network card installed and a USB network jack installed, and to my surprise both were detected and installed correctly once I’d loaded both ‘net-drivers’ disks.
The installation took about an hour, and I decided to forego installing X during the initial installation. After first boot-up I had 31MB out of 64MB free =)
Stupidly, I then did a:
apt-get install xorg xfce4
A couple of minutes later and following a startx, I was presented with a somewhat basic, but functioning, X windows environment. However, doing a free -m revealed that I only had 1MB of RAM free - so X was promptly uninstalled.
I'm soon to buy a new battery for the unit so it can act as my permanent portable console.