jtjersey

Funny how things work. I've recently had an IBM Thinkpad 600 come back
to me after several years in various parts of the country and several
users. It's a 300Mhz Pentium with Windows 98 (first edition), but
everything is in perfect working order and I hate to use it for a door
stop. I'd like to set it up with a Linux distro for I'm not sure what.
I tried Mandriva 2006 and Damn Small Linux, but they didn't play well
with the graphics and the display was unreadable. Any thoughts on
something that might work?

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Registered Linux User #267152

whiskers

How much RAM? Which graphics chipset? What screen resolution? How much
HD space is available for Linux? Did either distro run in text-only mode?

Whatever distro you use, you may need to manually select a graphics
'driver'; try a generic VESA driver at 640x480x8 to start with and if that
gives you something that works you can increase the resolution and colour
depth until it stops working, if you don't know what the hardware is
capable of (but the Windows system should be able to tell you all that
sort of stuff anyway). You'll also probably get better performance using
a 'lightweight' window manager/desktop environment; XFce4 is nice, or try
IceWM or Blackbox.

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-- ^^^^^^^^^^
-- Whiskers
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jtjersey

It's got 128Mb of memory with 2Mb NeoGraphics at 1280 x 760. I tried a
clean install of Mandriva/Linux and running Damn Small Linux from a CD,
but the problem is I end up with a screen display of only about three
colors and I can't read anything which makes it real hard to find the
display manager. Everything's there I just can't tell what it is.

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Registered Linux User #267152

whiskers

Not enough for Mandriva; twice that would help. One of the distros meant
for 'older' computers would be a better bet - but you won't get the same
bells and whistles as with a big distro, of course. If you can, double
the RAM at the very least. See
<http://www.mandriva.com/en/linux/spring/system_requirements>.


Perhaps DSL is not recognising the graphics correctly. I'm not familiar
with that distro so I can't give you step-by-step instructions, but the
first step may be to install it with the graphics not running
automatically on booting. That way you should at least get a functional
text console from which other things can be set up to get the graphics
working. With only 128MB RAM I don't think you'll ever get Mandriva
running with a GUI (unless you try a very old version of Mandrake, but I
don't recommend that if you want the machine to have a network connection
and you don't feel like patching the kernel and applications manually to
get the security updates up to date).

--
-- ^^^^^^^^^^
-- Whiskers
-- ~~~~~~~~~~

I have the same exact TP but with something like 384M. I have left
Mandrake 10.1 on it since I successfully configured a wifi card (with
ndiswrapper) to work with this lan, and it runs e17 quite nicely.
Whenever I install or testdrive a distro, I always put vga=791 at the
boot prompt. Play with the eLiveCD if you want, unless you're hardcore
KDE or GNOME; it doesn't require OpenGL but can fake it well.

Leave win98 on it if you can, because TP utilities line
THinkpadConfig can only run in Windows. When my CMOS battery needed
replacement, I had to enable 'Screen expansion' thru this utility so
that I dont wind up with an 800x600 screen in the middle of an ocean
of black.

Will post my xorg.conf here if you like. But (shameless plug follows)
a screenshot shows the 'snow' effect in e17:
http://geocities.com/she_died/screenshot.jpg

The drawbacks (not showstoppers, but minor quibbles that point me
towards an upgrade like a T40 from ebay):
1. Can't use USB to boot
2. TP turns dumb when it's a USB 2.0 stick or when it's USB, period
3. that CMOS reset affected sound (DMA/IRQ)
4. wouldn't upgrade the DVD to DVD-R as it doesn't have the horsepower
for a decent burn even for a CD-RW
5. wouldn't know if it's Mandrake's fault that there's no /mnt/
removable but I would still suspect it (for the USB stick again)

Regarding #3, I originally set up sound with hints from the IBM
website (Yes, I said IBM website) that enumerates step-by-step
procedure on how to install Linux on a TP600. IIRC it was RedHat right
before there was Fedora. So I recommend the TP600 for casual use as
in, couch-potato-style surfin in-front of TV kind of use.

ray

Try Elive. I've put it on a P166 with 64mb and it runs quite well.

jtjersey

Yeah, I'm not too worried about the lack of horsepower. It works as well
as it did when it was new and it's free! I've invested a grand total of
$18.00 for another SODIMM, but that's about it. Not even sure what I'm
going to do with it. I just hate to see it go to waste, so I'm thinking
it would be more versatile with a Linux distro in it instead of Windows
98SE or ME.
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Registered Linux User #267152

mike ©ampbell

Feather Linux will run fine on it.

jtjersey

Sure looks nice from the screen shots, but they make it real hard to
download. I wouldn't mind sending them a donation as they like, but I'd
like to see if it works first. Maybe I'll pursue that lead when I have
more time. Thanks.

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Registered Linux User #267152