Inst on Toshiba S5200 failed

Hello,
I tried to "revive" my old Toshiba Satelite S5200-801 with the Zorin 12 32-bit and failed miserably.
during the first booting of Zorin OS the display turns to bright and complete white (I feared that I lost the display)
(Upgrade with a 25 GB SSD drive and 2 GB RAM)
As this Laptop has a Super Fine Screen UXGA TFT display with a resolution of 1600 x 1200, I wonder if this is the reason

Any suggestions?

Thanks
Jo

Looking at the spec of your machine you can only expand to 1 Gb Max?

http://www.toshiba.eu/discontinued-prod ... 5200-801/#

I suspect even Zorin Lite would struggle and you'd probably have to do a 'force pae' and 'nomodeset' to even get it to run (worse than a 3-legged dog!)

My alternative OS for you is: Antix 17 or SolydX community Stable edition, both 32-bit versions. AntiX 17 only needs 256 Mb to run.

On a side note Toshiba's never were (in the past) GNU/Linux friendly machnes.

chronophage wrote:Hello,
I tried to "revive" my old Toshiba Satelite S5200-801 with the Zorin 12 32-bit and failed miserably.
during the first booting of Zorin OS the display turns to bright and complete white (I feared that I lost the display)
(Upgrade with a 25 GB SSD drive and 2 GB RAM)
As this Laptop has a Super Fine Screen UXGA TFT display with a resolution of 1600 x 1200, I wonder if this is the reason

Any suggestions?

Thanks
Jo

Chronophage,
Was the copy of Zorin OS that you used 12.4 Lite? Did you download the copy directly from the Zorin OS download page?
What method of installation did you use?

Hello "Swarfendor437" and thanks for your comments.
Sorry for the mistake, teh S5200 has 1,256 RAM (its max) installed.
I chose Zorin OS Lite because it is specified as : CPU 700 MHz Single Core - 64-bit or 32-bit / RAM 512 MB (!)
but also it states Display 640 × 480 resolution.
Toshiba's "unfriendlyness" towards GNU/Linux is very well known, specially with all their "special" machines ;-((
Thanks also for the suggestion of alternatives
BR

Hello Aravisian,
I downloaded directly as .iso file and booted directly from the CD!
No selection of an installation methode can be made as the display fails to display any "readable text"
Only random stripes and/or completely white (btw. the display is not broken, as I can boot an old Windows XP OS)
BR

You could try an older Zorin iteration from here:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/zorin-os/files/

5 was a great favourite of mine:

https://www.veoh.com/watch/v28327171rKZpnDke - Background Plus only available on Ultimate releases. But you could code your own 'background plus':

https://www.fosslicious.com/2019/04/set ... buntu.html - this would have been for Zorin 12/15?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NGLwJvlH8Q = Zorin 6 (Ubuntu 10.04)

I was looking for a very old YouTube video where someone achieved the same in ubuntu 7.10!

The only thing with older GNU/Linux is that the kernel had a major security flaw!

Puppy Linux might also be a good choice for your machine. It is surprisingly robust and full-featured. I had it running on my old Gateway Pentium II, with only 340 MB ram.