Project: considering doing for uni,
Thinkpad 240 will probably be the lucky laptop.

But will suse 9.2 work on this? or will i end up having to install a hell of alot of drivers, or even find obscure drivers that I probably wont be able to install.

If anyone can provide me with some helpful information, id be very greatful

Well it really depends on what you want to do with SuSe really....I personally don't use Suse but I heard its alright in the sense of auto hardware detection.....I'm not aware that any Linux Distro out there can automatically mount a usb drive or camera like you could with Windows XP....you often have to edit a file calle fstab under /etc/fstab...which tells the computer where all the disk drives are....like your harddrive, camera or even usb or printer.........so yeah if your afraid of doing a little bit of editing before you set off.....then I'm not entirely sure Linux is your choice...considering uni will give you aload of work to do........
Linux generally are a bit slow on drivers...because most stuff aren't made for linux so the developers have to write a code for it...but in terms of printing .......using a usb drive, camera its fine......but you might risk not being able to use the latest usb GADGET cause you don't have a program to interface with it.........

your right i really should have been more inteligent and tell you what i wanted to do with it first,

basically open office usb pen drive, network file sharing (only with my pc not the uni network) and of course using the music player playing it off my usb drive (5gb sticks are getting kinda cheap now)

if SuSE wouldnt be your first choice, what would u reccomend? mandrake perhaps?

SuSE should work ok on a machine like that. I know a few ppl using it on them. Like any Linux distro, you may need to do a bit of tweaking here and there and no matter which distro you choose, drivers for some devices may have to be installed.

What distro you pick really won't make much difference there. I personally avoid RPM based distros with their dependecny hell, but others swear by them so it's pretty much whatever you want to do.

Well if you are willing to learn more about linux....and that you are not afraid of the command line I would suggest using Slackware....its really stable and fast and has some really good window managers for you to try out...and if you have any problems you can always post it in the Distrobution forum......
My second choice would be Arch....it is also fast and stable...but their package system is very easy to use compared to other linux distros......

If you just want to try out running a live cd...try knoppix...its got really got hardware detection.....so some good software with it as well......so yeah try it out..is all I got to say

I'm personally using SuSE 9.2 personal on a Toshiba satellite, and the USB hotplug in SuSE seems second to none. I've tried Slack, Mdk, Fedora, etc.. and most of them had USB support but it entailed running a script once I plugged something in (not a big deal, you just hafta love writing scripts

SuSE pops up much like XP saying "You plugged in a USB such and such, what do you want to do? configure? ignore?", which worked perfectly with my USB flash drive, and USB wireless mouse / keyboard. All the drivers came with the default install, too.

So, if ease of use is your love in life, I'd highly recommend SuSE. Slack seems to me to be the most powerful distro, with the highest flexibility. If software / driver support is what you're looking for, the more corporate-type developed Red Hat or Fedora might be the way to go. Sounds to me though like your pick of SuSE oughta work just fine

I guess a good way to find out if SUSE 9.2 and Thinkpad 240 work well together is trying a LiveCD (ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/live-cd-9.2).

thats excelent, thanks to everyone for helping me out on this, basically my whole reason of buying a thinkpad is to stick linux on it and though im not afraid of linux and not really much of a stranger to linux (well in the most basic sense) I wated to be certain it wud work before spending 200 quid on something that, well lets face it, with windows it would be useless, linux seems to work very well on just about the lowest spec of machines,

thanks everyone

hold on.....why spend your money on Suse when you can get other distributions for free like slackware, gentoo , mepis , arch , ark , and Ubuntu.....Ubuntu is probably the best to start off with

Who told you that SUSE isn't free?

is it?? oh yeah...opps I forgot about it....I still kinda remembered Suse as being closed source a while ago...and the only version of suse you can download was the evaluation version

As ISO, that's right. But the full set of software (except commercial programs that are probably also not available in the 'free' distros) is available through FTP.

plus pcformat gave it away free the other month so i have the iso for 9.2 personal

If my memory serves me well...I believe that the IBM240 laptop lacks and internal Cd-rom drive.

They also happen to lack a Floppy drive.

So you are going to be faced with the challenge of trying to install software via a network connection, a paralell port or a USB port.

This is something to consider first before choosing a distro.

Thorn

thanks, i had forgotten the complications of that with linux, I'll give it a go nonetheless and if worst comes to the worst, il remove the hard drive, and use a connector to mounti it in my standardpc, and install from there