I am a relative newbite, and was told to ask my question in this particular forum. I am planning on installing either redhat 8 or 9 on my thinkpad r32.

I am trying to be proactive here, and would like to hear any suggestions you might have to save me trouble when installing.
Are there any known issues?

One concern I have is my NIC, which isn't PCMCIA, but rather a chip (similar to RAM) that I installed on the bottom of the laptop. I'm not sure how well Linux will respond to this type of hardware.

Please respond to the thread with any input or experience you might offer.

Hi,

I have installed many Linux distributions on my Thinkpad R31 which is very similar to your the R32, one of the main differences being the video chipset, which is supported. The only things I can think of that do not initially work are the ACPI subsystem and the modem. You'll definetely make it through the installation, tell us when you're done so we can help you out with the modem and eventually the ACPI feature (a lot of head-scratching).

Bye

P. S: There shouldn't be any problems with the NIC. Check http://www.linux-laptop.net/

Happy owner of a R32 here ... the on-board
ethernet is actually eepro100, and well supported
by the Linux-kernel. Or did you install a WLAN-
board?

The only issue (not an issue for me, though) is
the modem-chipset built into the box ... it's currently
NOT supported.

ACPI works fine with Kernels > 2.4.18 and the
patches from http://acpi.sourceforge.net ...
Which makes me wonder whether you shouldn't
go for a distro that uses stock-kernels ...
Slack, Debian, Gentoo, ...

Cheers,
Tink