Have thinkpad 560Z, with the above configuration. No CD, don't have external CD drive, but plan to install directly to HD by using another laptop first.

With above parameters, which distro is reasonable, DSL...

gychang

In the past I have run Linux on smaller and slower machines than you have. You can probably run any of the major distributions on your 560z. Gnome will probably work OK but KDE would probably be slow enough to be noticeable.

Does your 560z have network access? If so you could do a minimum install on the second machine and finish the install on the 560z.

I have done installs the way you propose. The main problem is that the installer will configure the hardware for the machine it installs on. The two hardware configurations must be similar for Linux to boot on the second machine. For example the machine you install on should have IDE drives and you should put the drive in the same location that it will occupy on the 560z.

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Steve Stites

I was going to take out the HD from the thinkpad and install into my high powered compaq laptop, install the distro and put the HD with installed distro back to the thinkpad (PII machine).

Will this work?, I have no network access.

gychang

Maybe. If the thinkpad HD will work on the compaq then the installer will probably configure it correctly. Other things to worry about are compatible screens and CPU model. The best thing to do is just try it and see if it works.

Since you have no network access I suggest that you don't use DSL because it doesn't have much of a package selection. Use a major Distribution like Debian or Fedora and install every package that you might ever have a need for. You don't want to have to move the HD every time you want to install a new package.

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Steve Stites

96 M ram doesn't seem to me to be enough for either KDE or Gnome, or at least it wasn't when I tried the experiment on SuSE a few years back, and I think both are likely to have suffered from middle aged spread since then.

(When I say "not enough", Gnome may just start, but I don't think that it would seem usable to me; YMMV.)

I would think that XFCE / windowmaker / fluxbox or even enlightenment would be a better bet.

8G will be a bit tight for that approach, unless you can define your needs more tightly than I usually manage to do. In any case, don't get tempted to use an over-fancy partitioning scheme. These always a little more disk space than a very simple one would and, if you get it wrong, it might even be a lot more space.

If you have a USB port that will accept a flash drive you can probably run any distribution that requires less than 100 MB RAM from the flash drive. The only distributions that come to mind are Puppy Linux and DSL (Damn Small Linux).

thanks, will try both.

gychang

I have an IBM 233mhz Thinkpad 280XD with 96mb mem & 10gb hard drive. I did a Debian netinst with fluxbox WM, but mine has a cdrom drive.

I had to use floppy boot disks to get started, then installed everything else from the repositories. It runs faster than Win98.

Trying the USB to boot may be a good idea, or try an external cd drive.

how did u get boot disk to start the install? In my case tell the boot disk to start USB install.

gychang

Crunchbang linux. Versatility of Ubuntu, speed of Openbox.

http://crunchbanglinux.org/

Sorry I didn't mention it but mine have both floppy & cdrom drives. I believe if it picks up the USB drive it should.

...boot from it???

If that is what you meant, I'm not sure that it is true. Most machines of that age don't have a 'boot from USB' option in the bios, and faced with a bootable device on a USB port, they sullenly ignore it until they have booted from something else.

Hi, maybe I'm late but I want to tell you how I installed Slackware on old Thinkpad 701 years ago, there's no CD-ROM or floppy drive neither.

First I bought an adapter what made possible to install 2,5' hard drive to desktop machine. Then I installed 'a series' from Slackware CD and copied contents of CDROM to laptops hard drive.

Then I moved hard disk back to laptop and booted it. Lastly I installed the rest of the distribution.

Slackware works, I promise

I just can reccommand Puppy. I have Puppy 2.12 running on that old PCs without a Problem

I could not get wpa encryption working on puppy, so DSL is working on it.

gychang