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Toshiba or not to shiba

You can't just execute the setup from within another OS. Linux is meant for geeks (which is why I love it so--not dumbed down).

Any and every laptop since 2001 has got USB ports. You might be confusing the HDMI port with the USB port, or your machine has USB Type C (yeah don't get me started on that rant!) which requires a stupid C-to-A dongle for a USB drive to work properly.

I like your old time phone revival idea, but unless your carrier still offers 3G you can forget it. Even LTE phones old enough to make me happy don't support VoLTE so they up and kill't my Thunderbolt and SII the creeps! They got an earful from me though and I just got a flip phone. All the VoLTE supported smartphones are too big and boring for me. I can theme them but can't theme them to be small enough. I'd love to find a modern slider with a 4" screen and Android 2.3 but VoLTE support. Certainly there's a way to do that with a custom ROM?

The easiest way is to find an older laptop (from 2012 or earlier) with a CD-RW drive, and then you can run an older but usable distro like Mandriva or Vector 6 which would suffice for YouTube and basic browsing. The UI would definitely look nicer.
 
I'm "lucky" to have this piece of junk. What I mean by a revival is to fix that stinkin' Stylus that conked out months ago. It got stuck on that weird (to me) startup menu, and now it doesn't do squat. At least the bright white light at the top blinks and it makes it known that the battery is at 0%, which is pretty obvious because how is it going to charge if it can't stop having seizures...I just hope that the more than $75 I have invested in the crimebook isn't going to waste.
 
Motorolas with flashing white notification LEDs are normally dead for good. That's the 'blinking light of death'. I lost a Moto G5 that way. It just went dead and only blinked that light (oddly enough, there's no way to actually use it as a notification LED so why's it there?!)

The G Stylus might be in perma death. the blinks mean the battery circuit is fried or the battery became defective.
 
Can I bring it back to life or at least do a data scrape? I tried to put most things on sd, but it would be nice. Do I really have to spend even more money on a CD, especially when the pos might not have a drive for it, or a USB drive, which I guess is a flash drive?
 
If it's anything like my G5 it's dead, Jim!

I tried keeping it plugged in (which made it get warm, but that was it), tried taking it apart, tried unplugging the battery ribbon cable and re-inserting it, but no dice. It was utterly gone. All it takes is a dead charging circuit, shorted Lithium battery or anything that the system deems is 'dangerous'

You can thank the infamous Note 7 fear mongering for that one! I was able to keep one of my HTC Thunderbolts (I had a collection when they still worked) going although it had a dead microUSB port, by literally soldering wires straight to the battery to a USB cable which I stuck onto a clip on the phone's rear cover, where I could just plug it straight into any USB port and it'd charge (although it never showed it charging, it just went from whatever percentage it was at to full). Back in the glory days you could do dangerous stuff like that. Today's phones have tiny flat ribbon cables that connect straight to the motherboard of the phone and aren't able to be hacked in that fashion otherwise you might have been able to 'force' it to charge and if the phone then booted, you'd know the charging circuit itself was FUBAR'd.
 
Is a USB drive the same thing as a flash drive? What's the minimal size I would need for Ubuntu? I'm thinking I should probably not go overboard on it, especially since I just spent more than $75 for the 2 tb hard drive and wireless mouse, and I haven't used either of them yet.
 
If it's just to hold the .iso file to install Ubuntu from, then 4GB would be fine, but if you want to install on the USB drive, then a minimum of 32GB.
USB drive is the same as a flash drive - the flash refers to the type pf memory chips in the drive.
 
Thanks, it's just a little confusing with all these terms for apparently the same thing. Is there a way I could use the "computer" to download Ubuntu to the 2 tb hard drive and from there bounce it back to the crimebook? That way I could save the hassle, expense, and road trip of getting the flash drive. I just want to make this pig in a poke usable, asap.
 
Only if the 'crimebook' can boot from the 2TB hard drive. I've never had one (All Linux/FOSS here) so I don't know what's in their UEFI/BIOS)
 
I took the plunge and paid $6.07 for a 32 gb flash drive at walmart. I still have to figure out which port. Maybe I can do something about it next weekend. I guess I can somehow download Ubuntu onto it, but I still don't get why it takes all that trouble. It seems to me that it should be possible just to put it on the hard drive and be done with it.
 
You won't be able to boot the image just by copying the *.ISO to the drive. You have to 'burn' it with an imaging tool such as Rufus or another utility in order to make it 'bootable'.

That sadly often involves either a Windows PC (for Rufus) or a cryptic Linux utility (if you got another Linux machine lying around)

The only Chromebook I ever had was an Acer C720 and it was (is, i still have it lying around) garbage. It was even worse in Linux. (back then, you had to hack the system, get some sort of terminal, type in some commands to root it and install Ubuntu that way--it wouldn't boot from the USB) But performance was crap. It barely ran at all, was always running the fan full hilt, and ran out of memory just opening Firefox to Youtube.com.

Chromebooks are trash. They're just specced enough to run ChromeOS, and that's it. Attempting to do more with them (like full desktop Linux or Windows) will make them perform like an old i486 booting Windows 95 with only 4MB of RAM. (yes, I'm THAT old).

If you're truly interested in Linux, you'd be far better off with one of those "Gateway" laptops at Walmart that go for $129 each. Those are fully compatible with desktop operating systems and you can easily wipe Windows whatever it is and boot the USB and put whatever you want on them. They're also 2-in-one so you can flip the screen over and it's a tablet.

I got one of those 'netbooks' for work, and it's quite handy. I am running Windows "Vista" (Windows 11 with all the '11' stuff removed, replaced with Vista assets and apps) on the thing as it is.
 
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Thanks, that'll give me ANOTHER thing to save up for...oh, well. At least it's fairly cheap. It's almost enough to make these crazy phones look usable. Why can't I just put all my stuff, photos, videos, whatever, in one noncloud place such as a hard drive? I would like to have it together instead of scattered across a bunch of sd cards.
 
Wish me luck. I'm probably going to mess around with this thing today, though God knows why (I almost don't). I am doing battle against the crimebook with a Toshiba 2 tb hard drive, a 32 gb flash drive, and a wireless mouse. Maybe I should throw in some chain mail for good measure. God save the king!
 
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