Installing Linux on old netbooks

You know, I'm not in the least afraif of Linux. I'm by no means a trained sysadmin, but I've been using Linux for about three decades, and I effectively haven't used Windows in the past five years. This is partially because I'm an Open Source sympathizer. If I weren't, I wouldn't have been involved in organizing Open Source conferences for so long that I forgot when I started doing that. But at least as important is the fact that I got fed up ages ago with my operating system deciding all kinds of things for me that I can decide perfectly well for myself. And over the past years, that hasn't exactly been getting better.

What I do fear, though, is breaking stuff and throwing things out. This is one of the main reasons I never got into systems administration and remained at the 'knowledgeable user' level. I get nervous when I have to install updates on my computer, because I worry that something will stop working. Installing a new operating system scares me. At the same time, and for the same reason, I'm a bit of a hoarder. I still have nearly all computers that I've used in the past decennia, because heaven forbid I might still need one of them, or the data that's on them. That never actually happens, except for a couple of old photos that I've backed up three times already, but that's how my brain works.

Because of this, I've had two netbooks, which were pretty cheap when I got them but that I've used quite a lot, sitting on a shelf for years. Two netbooks with specs that aren't actually all that bad, but running Windows 8, which is pretty useless in this day and age. I'd considered installing something else on them before, but the prospect scared me, and I never had the time (who has time for anything), and? You know. It just never happened.

But still... With Windows 10 no longer being supported, and increased awareness of the consequences of simply putting everything 'in the cloud', I was reading more and more about switching to Linux for people who have always used Windows. Tutorials appeared online to help people who know far less about computers than I do install Linux. And if those people can do it, then surely I can do it too, right? At the same time, I'm finally getting a little bit better at letting go of things that aren't useful anymore (though not at all of things that are still useful). And for one of the aforementioned conferences, it would be nice to have a couple of spare laptops. And I also want to challenge myself a bit more in several areas. So, long story short: Those netbooks, they needed a Linux install.

Of course I wanted to limit the risks as much as possible. I was happy to sacrifice the Windows installations for this experiment, but not the netbooks themselves, and preferably not the data they still contained, either. (Yeah, I know I said I'd already backed them up three times?) And if possible, I wanted to learn from it, too. So I decided to approach it systematically, and write down what I'd done and how it worked out. (Spoiler: Some things went effortlessly, but there was a bump in the road that did throw me off for a bit.)

To begin with, I had a look at what exactly I had to work with. This turned out to be a pair of Medion Akoya netbooks, an E1232T and an E1318T. I also quickly found the E1232T's power supply, but not the one belonging to the E1318T. (They essentially use the same power supply, but with a different connector, so I couldn't just use the same power supply unit for both.) Fortunately I did find the power supply of an even older laptop, which had the right specs as well as the right connector, so I could use that. Next, I searched the Internet to see whether other people had succesfully installed Linux on these systems. This turned out to be the case, which was something I needed to know. (If I had only found stories of people who had failed, I would have thrown in the towel or found another computer to experiment on.)

Next, I wanted to know the specs of both netbooks. In particular, I wanted to find out the amount of memory, the disk size and whether or not they had 64-bit processors. In order to find out, I turned them on (fortunately they both still worked), logged into Windows 8 (my brain forgot the password I used back then, but fortunately my fingers remembered), and opened the Control Panel to look up the required information. They turned out to be very alike: Both netbooks have 4GB of RAM, a harddisk of about 460GB and a 64-bit processor. The only difference here is that for the E1232T, that processor is a 1.58GHz Intel Celeron, and the E1318T has a 1.00GHz AMD processor.

Now that I was logged in anyway, I thought I might as well make a backup of the data. (Yes, yes, I know I'd done that three times already?) So, I connected my external harddisk. And there we had the first problem. As I mentioned before, I haven't used Windows in years, so my external disk has been formatted on a Linux computer. Therefore, the file system on the disk is one Windows can't easily read or write. Ok, I could have seen that one coming, so with a sigh (I really do have those backups somewhere, right?), I decided to skip this step. (I could have made a backup on a USB stick, but I was too impatient for that, and besides, I needed the only USB stick I had on hand for the next step.)

In the mean time, I'd turned on my 'main' laptop and looked up a tutorial. To be precise, https://linuxvooreenbeginner.nl by Michael Boelen. (This tutorial is in Dutch. Others exist in English.) What I read there (but I kind of knew that already) was that the first step is to create a bootable USB stick containing the Linux distribution you want. Linux Mint was mentioned as a distro suitable for beginners. I don't consider myself a beginner when it comes to using Linux, but when it comes to installing it, I do. And Linux Mint has a 'light' version, the 'Xfce Edition', that seemed suitable for these netbooks. So, that's what I went with. I went to the Linux Mint webside and downloaded the 'Xfce Edition' ISO file (and verified that it was correct in the way described there). Then I used 'Startup Disk Creator', which was already installed on my Ubuntu laptop, to turn the USB stick I had into a bootable USB stick with Linux Mint.

Back to the netbooks. I decided to start with the E1232T. There was no particular reason for that, or it must have been that that's the first one I found when looking up whether installing Linux was possible. In any case, the first thing I had to do was change the boot order in the BIOS settings in order to boot from USB. For both netbooks, entering the BIOS is done by pressing F2 while booting. I quickly found the option to change the boot order. But wait a second? There wasn't an option to boot from USB at all! Fortunately, that option appeared when I tried again with the USB stick inserted. After changing the boot order, I could start the system from USB without any trouble.

I'd taken the first hurdle. Great! Now I could move on to the next step. Linux Mint had started a nice graphical environment. On the desktop, there was an icon with the name 'Install Linux Mint'. That was what I wanted to do, clearly, but first I wanted to have a quick look around. I noticed that my Windows partitions were nicely readable from Linux as well. But wait a second? Linux can, of course, read and write my external harddisk. So I can back up my data after all! Yay! So that's what I did, I copied all folders containing user data to the external disk. Then I ejected and unplugged that disk. Now I could really get started.

I double-clicked the installation icon to start the installation process. A couple of questions were asked and I answered them. One of the questions was whether the installer should try to unmount the existing partitions before overwriting them. I wanted to delete the whole disk, so I answered 'yes' to that. The installation process continued with more questions. So far so good? Until an error message appeared.

Apparently, Linux Mint didn't manage to unmount the existing partitions, and as a result, the installer could not tell the kernel that the partition table had changed. Or something along those lines. It said I had to restart the system before continuing. So I did. No problem. Right?

Right?

That's where the problems began. The partitions on the harddisk had changed. That meant that there was no longer a working Windows installation on there, but there wasn't Linux on it yet either. So I could no longer boot from the harddisk. Which shouldn't have mattered, because the system was booting from the USB stick. Except? It didn't! I got a confusing error message, and that was it.

What was going on? I didn't know. The first time, the netbook started perfectly from the USB stick, and now it didn't? Had the USB stick changed? That seemed like the most logical conclusion, given that the USB stick was what the computer was trying to boot from, and the fact that things changed on the harddisk shouldn't matter for that, I thought. That was an easy theory to test, as I had a second netbook on hand. If that one wouldn't boot from the USB stick either, clearly that would be the problem, and I could just write the ISO to the USB stick again and everything would be OK.

But the second netbook, the E1318T, started just fine from the USB stick. I decided to make a backup of the data on this netbook as well, and then see if the install would succeed on this one if I rebooted the system after making the backup. I reasoned that perhaps the unmounting of the partitions had gone wrong because I'd been reading data from them. And sure enough, the first reboot went well. I started the installer, answered the questions, and...

Same error.

There wasn't a lot I could do, other than reboot and keep my fingers crossed that it would work. But alas, this netbook, too, now refused to boot from the USB stick.

End of the line? I don't think so! Not so long ago, I'd have thrown in the towel at this point, but I didn't feel like that now. Besides, it seemed sensible to try to solve the problem right away, before the details of what was going on slipped my mind.

By now, I was chatting a bit with someone I'd talked to before about my plan to install Linux on these netbooks. He gave me some pointers on how to change my BIOS settings to get the E1318T to boot from the USB stick again. And it worked! I started the installer again, and since there wasn't an old Windows installation in the way anymore, installing Linux Mint happened without further problems. So, I had achieved getting Linux to work on one of the netbooks, at least. Going from two unusable netbooks to one that was still unusable and one that runs Linux is still an improvement.

The E1232T turned out to be a whole other story. One of the BIOS settings I had changed on the E1318T (the 'Launch CSM' setting) was nowhere to be seen on the E1232T. Apparently this setting allows booting to happen if not everything on the bootable USB stick is entirely in the right place. And I could find the required files, but you can't just move them around in an ISO file.

The solution turned out to be to make a whole different bootable USB stick. I gambled that Ubuntu tends to be more complete than Linux Mint, and that perhaps that would mean the right files would be in place there, and whether or not that was correct, it worked. A bootable USB stick with an Ubuntu ISO was accepted by the netbook, and installing went without a hitch. So now I have one netbook running Linux Mint and another one running Ubuntu, and both work fine (except for the E1232T's battery, which appears to be doing nothing at all, but that's another matter entirely, and with the power supply connected it's still a working netbook). Ubuntu is a bit heavier than Linux Mint, so I'll have to see how well it works in practice, but it should be fine for simple tasks, and now that it has a working Linux install, I can always see later if I can use, for example, a lighter window manager. Linux Mint is working fine, in any case. The only thing that didn't go quite so well was trying to play a Youtube video. (Playing video locally with VLC wasn't a problem.) As such, I'm typing this story in LibreOffice on the Linux Mint netbook.

The moral of the story? There are several. For starters, it turned out to be a lot less scary to delete Windows and install Linux than I had expected, even though it didn't initially go the way I wanted or the way it was described on various websites. What seemed to be an insurmountable problem, both netbooks refusing to boot from the USB stick after they did do so at first, turned out to be solved pretty quickly after all. The solution was not the same for both netbooks, while the E1318T needed only some BIOS setting changes, the E1232T needed a different bootable USB stick, and therefore ended up with a different Linux distribution. And most of all, I managed to do this with only a little bit of help (thanks, Mitchell and Johan), and I'm not thinking 'Never again', but rather 'Could I do this with the even older laptop that that power supply belongs to?' - while I did worry beforehand whether I could do it. So that's pretty encouraging.