New Laptop Alert!!! SL510

I just got a "new" laptop! Let's put some linux on it.

This bad boy stood out to me because of the notes taped to the wristwrest, which were illegible on the listing. Unfortunately, they are just some sort of weird instructions for when this was being used in an office or something. Besides this, it is about the same as my R400, except that it has a dedicated GPU, meaning it should be able to run supertuxkart and classicube at a smooth 60 fps (maybe). It is also missing my precious trackpoint, which is simply cataclysmic, but luckily that's super cheap and easy to replace, so no worries there.

The first thing to do after getting a new used laptop is to plug it in immediately without testing it. Doing this the first time resulted in a series of earsplitting beeps. While unpleasant, this also told me that there was no memory in the computer. Luckily, I have a bunch of laptop DDR3 laying around from I guess some old laptops I took apart a long time ago, so I tossed in a 4G stick and booted it up. The computer kind of turned on, the fan was spinning, the power indicator was solid, and the right lights were blinking the right way, but there was no display.

This was vexing. I spent a long time fiddling with the display cables and taking the whole laptop apart, which was a huge hastle. In a last ditch effort, I put in my 2G stick of DDR3 that I had, and boom, it booted. I don't know much about computer memory, but the fact that every thinkpad from this era can only use some DDR3 memory is super annoying.

Now that the computer booted, there was another issue. There was some type of problem with the BIOS password, which was strange, considering the BIOS password was diabled according to the BIOS settings. Luckily, all that was needed was a CMOS battery replacement which I already had around.

It took me FOUR OPERATING SYSTEMS to finally get something installed on this machine. Things were bad enough that I had to use a spinning drive because all of the SATA SSDs are being used right now, and I guess ventoy or something was causing issues but none of the live environments were working very good. Arch wouldn't install properly (I admittedly was using archinstall, but I've earned it), Void couldn't install GRUB correctly, even my last resort, Lubuntu, wouldn't work. Finally, I bit the bullet and installed Debian, my nemesis. Debian is not for desktop use, and I stand by that. Debian still took two tries for some inexplicable reason, but I got it installed successfully on this slow ass hard disk.

Now that there is a real OS installed on this thing, I wanted to install a desktop environment so I can play some games. I wanted XFCE, but apparently the package name isn't xfce for some reason, so I just installed lxqt. I want to do an openbox rice on this thing, but I am going to replace this shit HDD as soon as possible, so I'm gonna hold off until then to do anything drastic.