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Bored with my Windows desktop, and spending more time on the road, I dusted off my old Dell Latitude E5400 laptop. Some years ago, I picked this up from the salvage pile at a local university, think I paid like $30. This is vintage 2008 tech.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/lfa6n9579fuwsg0/2018-03-24%2011.16.31.jpg

I picked up a cheepo battery from eBay, gives me about 3 hours without being plugged in, this is really a lugable.

There's also an issue with the cable to screen, sometimes it flakes out and the contrast goes out of whack, there's a spot on the bottom left corner that will fix it if you tap it right.

At one point, I had a 128GB SSD in this, but I pulled it out and put it in a family member's laptop. Dug up a 1TB spinning rust drive, and loaded Lubuntu 17.10. We're up and running.

Wireless wants to work out of the box, but this machine has some weird rev of the Broadcom bcm4322, so I had to connect to a wired network and install broadcom-sta
sudo apt install broadcom-sta-common
sudo apt install broadcom-sta-dkms

Had to hack ~/.config/openbox/lubuntu-rc.xml to get the volume/mute buttons working.

I use an IronKey to store passwords, need to install lib32gcc1 to get that working
sudo apt-get install lib32gcc1

Did a bunch of interface tweaks (dpi, icon size, placement, etc)

Installed installed Terminus
http://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/

Installed PIA ubuntu client. v77 works right out of the box!
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/installer/download_installer_linux

My goal for this machine is do a little coding and playing some older DOS/Windows games.

Eventually, I'll spring for a newer model. But I kinda like this old dog at the moment.