My home PC is running at WIN98SE, with an old P3 grade Celeron 850MHz CPU and 256M RAM. Frankly speaking, I am still satisfied with its performance (fast boot up and power off time) because I just mainly use it for Internet web browsing. I even recently install GIMP to touch those photos taken by Canon CHDK hack (See my Yahoo Blog in Chinese)
I used to have an old CD writer (model: Philips PCRW1208) but it has been faulty for more than 1 year and I do not use it any more. Recently, I got an impulse to install Ubuntu (a Linux distribution). Since the old BIOS does not support booting from USB flash drive, I need a working CD-ROM drive to proceed.
Although I can buy an old CD-ROM drive (about HK$50), I think if I can use DVD disk to my hard disk backup as well, I will feel better because my recent digital photo file sizes grow at nearly 1GB per month.
After gathering information from Internet, I confirm a DVD drive can be installed in my old PC via IDE without any additional drivers. In order to minimize the risk, I just bought the cheapest model (LG GSA-H54N) which costs just HK$190. Although it is cheap, it still supports all prevailing DVD formats (DVD ± R/RW as well as Double Layer). However, I cannot use the bundled software (Nero Express, PowerProducer and PowerDVD) because they all need at least WIN2K or above. Worst still, the original Adaptec Easy CD Creator 4 (now acquired by Roxio) bundled with the old Philips driver does not recognize the new drive.
Fortunately, I can find free burning software on Internet which still supports WIN98SE. I downloaded ImgBurn Version 2.3.2 as well as InfraRecorder version 0.44.1. Although both applications can recognize my new drive, InfraRecorder still disables the OK button in the BURN dialog (though the revision history stated that 0.44.1 did solve this problem!)
Finally, after some trial, I successfully use ImgBurn to burn DVD-R and DVR+RW on my new LG drive. (Just one comment, the User-interface of ImgBurn is quite technical and I need to take some time to get along with.)
Back to my Ubuntu installation. After backing up my important files in the hard disk, I start the Ubuntu installation (on the same hard disk with my WIN98SE but in a separate partition). Everything is fine except the following:
- my FAT32 partition is mounted with UTF encoding, though actually it should be BIG5 (in order to minimize risk, I unmount this partition, but it also disconnect the bridge between the Windows world and and Linux world)
- the SIS 630 Video driver is not installed properly (I need to boot back Windows and reconfirm the hardware configuration and go back to Ubuntu to manually install the driver)
- my soft modem is not working (Oh!, there is still no solution yet.)
- SCIM Chinese table is not installed by default, though I have selected Chinese as the default locale. ( I need to boot back Windows to download the relevant SCIM package only a flash driver and install it in Ubuntu.
So far, I am very satisfied with my recent adventure with my old PC.
