Hey I have an old IBM ThinkPad 560e P1, 166 MMX, 48MB, 6GB. I am basically looking to install Damn Small in it with a working Java 1.4 programming environment and a lightweight GUI.

I removed the hd from the machine and ran the install on a much more powerful machine, as well as apt'ed in the javasdk1.4. I also created a swap file of 256 and put it in the fstab. Life there is good, its basically set up as much as I want it to be.

But back in the laptop, I cannot startx. I've run the xsetup.sh utility a million times and I've tried each X setup config possible. I usually get a smaller-than-full-screen garble of coloured blocks, occasionally I get a blank black screen, and in the lowest (640x480x4bit) I get a smaller-than-full-screen horrible grey X that is just... not going to work. Often the error is:
Does anyone know a good way to tackle this machine? Its old and slow so I don't expect much from it, but full screen and colour would be great, with a working X, xterm, javac, and vi. Its all there but the X.

This laptop also has zero USB ports and zero Ethernet/RJ-45 ports, so any network connectivity relies on (a) me buying a pcmcia card (doubt it) or (b) removing the hard drive again for any installs of OS or programs and removal of files (it has no CD nor FD either!) (yeah I know that this isn't exactly "networking"). This is more of a "learning java" machine than any real programming work.

Thanks for any ideas...

These links might be of some use to you.

http://www-lfg.stanford.edu/bresnan/ephemeral/thinkpad/

http://www.chesh.com/neil/tp560e.html

They're quite old, but the principle should remain the same. Otherwise, I couldn't find much on the specs of the 560e (but then I didn't spend to long looking).

As for 'Networking' you might want to consider PLIP - using a parallel cable and your regular machine as a proxy. Not quick and not necessarily easy, but certainly an interesting experiment.

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/PLIP.html

Hope that helps a little.

RG

Yeah, I've seen those pages. Thing is that Damn Small Linux doesn't have a normal XF86config-type file; I may be able to install XFree86 if I put the drive back into a larger machine... I'll let you know if I get anywhere with this. Thanks for the response.

Oh, and the parallel idea seems... about perfect for this project.