[If you just want to hear about me getting the Inspiron working, scroll to the next heading.]

I love collecting old computers for use in my classroom. I just found a handful of unused (but not so old) computers in a computer lab at school. They were Dell Optiplex 270’s – Pentium 4, 2.8 ghz, and 1gb of RAM.

Can you believe that the tech coordinator was thinking of tossing them now that we got new computers (which aren’t much better)? To follow up on that post, I built myself a new machine (Core 2 Duo, 2.8 ghz, 4gb RAM, 1gb Video Card) at the end of the summer for $500 (+$100 for a 19″ widescreen LCD monitor). /frown

But hey. Her loss, my gain. I now have four shiny Dell’s in the back of my room. If I can re-arrange things and get the furniture situated, I’ll have 12-14 decent computers connected to the internet in my own classroom. That’s a regular Social Studies classroom.

Back to the topic at hand, though. My mom wanted to help me in my crusade to collect as many old-but-useful computers as possible, so she spread the word at church. One of her friends had some old laptops she wanted to get rid of, and I became the owner of three new-old Dell laptops. Two of them seemed salveagable, but the third was a bit too old even for my taste.

I got one of them working quickly without any trouble. I installed xubuntu and took it into school. I still need to install the extra RAM that I purchased and get the USB wireless adapater working, but until then it’s sitting on the counter, plugged into the network with an ethernet cable and working fine. One of my students in particular loves to work at that laptop, and I can’t figure out why – because it’s the oldest and (relatively speaking) slowest of all the machines in my room.

Installing Ubuntu on a Dell Inspiron 2600

The other useable machine, though, is a Dell Inspiron 2600. It seems that the graphics card in this particular Dell Inspiron is trouble, and it’s (not so) tough to get a Ubuntu install to work. I tried the latest install CD, and I got a blank screen. Umm… uh oh. What do I do?

After some research, I figured out my best bet was to install Ubuntu 8.04 (instead of the latest, 9.10) on the machine. I got a bunch of information from the Ubuntu forums, and some really helpful insights from this post on apfrod.

I burned a new image of the 8.04 Hardy Heron alternate install to a DVD and popped it into the Dell. It booted into the installation, but there were freaky lines across the screen. I ignored them for the moment, and the installation went otherwise smoothly.

When I was done, the computer booted to a blank gray screen. Eugh. I turned the computer on, saw some text and the grub loader, saw a splash screen, and them BLAM. Gray screen. Hmm…

So, I followed the suggestion I found on apfrod and specified a display driver in the xorg.conf file.

To do that, I first booted to the command prompt. To do this, I hit “Escape” while the computer was booting. That let me choose to boot into recovery mode. From there, I told it I wanted to go to the shell prompt.

At this point, I navigated to the /etc/X11 directory. You should be able to do this by typing

cd /etc/X11

I edited the xorg config file by typing

nano xorg.conf

Following the instructions in the apfrod post I changed the following section:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
EndSection

to

Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Option "UseFBDev" "true"
Driver "i810"
EndSection

I rebooted the computer and low and behold… it worked! The gui loaded up perfectly, and I started downloading/installing updates.

Woot! Another working computer for my classroom.