Hi,

Does anyone have any distro recommendations for a Thinkpad 540 with the follwoing spec:

• P133 CPU
• 16MB RAM
• 1 GB HD
• External Floppy Disk Drive
• PCMCIA Network card (Netgear FA411)

I would like a simple GUI if possible...

Thanks in Advance

Take a look at the following:
http://www.geocities.com/dueze/thinkpad750c.html

Also, try searching google for "linux on laptops", "laptop linux", etc.

I run Slack 9.0 on my ThinkPad 560. Fluxbox runs fine. Your biggest limitation will be the HD space (me even more so as I only have 800M), but with a fairly minimal install you shouldn't run into major problems.

Which video card is in that one?
Mine has a Trident Cyber 9385, and there are some versions of XFree86 that don't seem to like the Trident cards. I'm running mine off of the generic VESA drivers, but I haven't had time to mess with it much.
Just a heads up there.

ok that sounds good. Was there any spceific setup for Fluxbox and XFree86 that you encountered?

There were no problems at all with fluxbox. Just d/l, compile, and enjoy.

Configuring X was/is a different story. Like I said before, I have not been able to get the standard Trident driver to work at all. The screen shows up all fuzzy and garbled (does that make sense? it's hard to explain), So I run X using just the generic VESA driver, and while it's only currently running at a color depth of 8, for what I use it for I don't really care. Furthermore, I think if I were to invest some more time I could get past that problem. The display is capable of 16 bit color @ 1024x768. I think it's just a matter of using a different version of XFree86 than what comes with my distribution.

I installed Slack 9.1 and i transferred the Kernel from the floppy. Now I am getting an error when I boot that says:

Any ideas?