Step 1: Find some old hardware

The best way to find some old laptop is to use eBay (www.ebay.com). I browsed by categories (Computers & Networking:Laptops:Toshiba:Less than 266 MHz) to find some Pentium I laptop. I searched a Toshiba as I used some of them 10 years ago and was very satisfied by the quality of the screen (of course, not even near to what we can get today, but still nice).

My first purchase was a Toshiba 430CDT. Since then, I bought a Toshiba 500CDT (but be careful as you need a caddy to attach the hard drive and this caddy is often not included), a Toshiba 410CDT, a 420CDT, a 510CDT and a 445CDX (which was an error as the X does not mean TFT but dual scan screen, i.e. useless to build a digital picture frame). During theses buys, I discovered an invaluable information source: Toshiba laptop detailed specs. Using this page, you can find all the caracteristics of the different models (caddy issues, embeded power adapter, ...).

If you are not in a hurry, you can find very good deal on those old laptops. I bought mine for $30 to $50 (shipping included). Beware not to spend too much on the laptop (I have seen some of them sold for more than $100 !). Just take your time and wait for the right moment.

Step 2: The technical challenge

As I received the laptop, I (re-)discovered that 10 years ago it was not so easy to install an operating system:

  • no floppy was provided
  • no boot from CD-ROM
  • no USB port

The other specs were quite low too: 75 MHz processor, 8MB of RAM, 500 MB hard-drive. After some research, I finally found a way to install Linux on the hard-drive, but a minimal install (using Mandrake 9.1) was using more than 200 MB of disk space and I still had some customization to do in order to have an e-frame booting out-of-the-box. I had to find a better way.

To be continued ...

In the next part, I will explain how to install a customized Linux using only 15 MB of disk space, but still offering all the needed features (wireless support, Web-based configuration, easy pictures export using Samba share).