Looking for a linux distribution for a really old laptop
My school just felt the need to gave away a bunch of IBM Thinkpad 600E laptops and I thought it would be a nice little computer to have for word processing and a little bit of programming when I'm not at my desktop.
Problem is, it came from the school loaded with msdos and I'd really feel more comfortable with a graphical interface, but I can't seem to find a reliable source for a really old linux distribution that will run on it. So does anyone have any links to something that will run it mostly just for word processing? Preferably in an iso. I can do without the ability to actually compile any modern programming if that's too much to ask of this little guy. EDIT: Sorry, forgot to put a note at the original post. I managed to use a cd-rw to install the latest version of damn small linux and it works just fine. Thanks for your help everyone. |
Puppy and bodhi will both run on that rig ok. Go to distrowatch and get the iso. Slackware 12.1 is another that will run on it ok.
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You don't give us any specs on the machine, that model had various levels of specification from 266 MHz to 400 MHz with 32 to 64 MB RAM.
Debian Lenny (oldstable) with the i486 kernel and maybe even the i686 kernel will run on it if you use a minimal setup, i.e. Fluxbox or something extremely lightweight. I think you could probably, with a little bit of work, get Squeeze (current stable) running on it reasonably ok. Lets put it this way, with any currently supported distro (apart from Puppy or DammSmallLinux) the machine isn't going to be a rocket but for simple work it should be satisfactory. |
The thing is that it probably won't boot to a cd and defiantly won't boot to usb.
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I loaded it with Puppy, but getting an error message at boot.
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Loading drivers needed to access disk drives.. done EDIT: it does go past the puppy intro page and I can use the function keys to get into the help files, but after that it just boots with that error. |
Try An Older Version of Puppy
I would suggest you drop back to some older versions of Puppy and check the Puppy Distro pages for instructions on how to make a boot FLOPPY DISK that might further your progress. And the Damn Small Distro is also worth a try.
Good luck, Michael |
I would step away from Puppy at all, ON a machine with so small amount of RAM it won't work, and it doesn't make sense to run any distro from RAM if there is not enough RAM. Try ConnochaetOS, Slackware with Fluxbox or, if it has a i686 capable processor, maybe Arch is worth a try.
We could help you much better if you tell us the specs of that machine. |
I would love to tell you the specs of the machine, but I have no way of getting the specs. the thing doesn't have a bios screen for some reason (really, nothing, just blank screen then whatever I have loaded into it at the time) and I currently don't have the tools available to disassemble it and look at the parts (forgot my toolbox at home this semester, been kicking myself over it for months). Regardless, I'm gonna have to wait till tomorrow to get another cdr or floppy to try anything else. probably get a rewriteable this time though just in case this happens again.
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You may be wasting money on buying a cd-rw as the machine may not be able to read one. Actually some older machines cannot even read cd-r and can only read cd-rom. Are there any labels underneath the machine? Manufacturers often put a model number and other details which you can then lookup online to see what you have. An example of this is my laptop on the lid it says RV511 but if you look at my signature you can see there is other information and that makes a difference.
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I'm thinking that Slacko Puppy 5.3's kernel 2.6.37.6 may be too new for that 600 you have.
You might go with http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=42553 since I don't know your ram specs. This version of Puppy was made for legacy computers like yours. I run AntiX 11 on my P3 IBM a22m but my ram I bumped it up to 512MB to run comfortably. It ran AntiX ok on 256MB of ram, but not with too many apps open. Requires a /swap partition also of about 700MBs. Edit: saw the post above mine. He is right. My IBM a22m which is newer than yours and has a DVDROM drive won't boot cdrw. Just cdr. |
Just another thread you can look through to see what IBM 600 Puppy users use.
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=51474 Edit: and another thread http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=27224 |
In dos try
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msd If you have lots of time to read loads of wiki's then Arch would mean you could have a gui that does just what you want to and nothing else. :) |
From the current Debian Stable (Squeeze) installation guide.
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The Plop linux boot manager is capable of booting a PC whose bios is unable to boot from CD or USB Check it out. http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html The following distros will work on this machine. Debian 3.0, Red Hat ver 6.0, Slackware ver 10 Ubuntu 5.04 with openbox should work just fine. DSL (Damn Small Linux) will be fine if you use the 50 MB version. And of course Win95 |
The best bet would probably go with Debian netinstall but it will take some work and know how. You can boot using floppy disk, I believe Debian still offer the root and boot floppy disk. It may take some work to get sound working also.
I've done it with an IBM 266mhz Thinkpad and only 96mb of memory. It's been some years back and I had less memory than the 96mb at the time. |
A few years back I did the same thing with an old Compaq from the same era.
I used DamnSmall Linux at the time. I believe some of the caveats were:
If doing it today, I'd probably try TinyCore Linux, which may or may not work since it runs a recent kernel etcetera, but worth a try. Otherwise, with enough knowledge, an install of Debian or some other distro that can be heavily tailored during/prior-to install might be the way to go. Of course, there are lots of other options out there as well. Here's a useful distrowatch.com search for distros targeting old computers. Scroll down to see the list. |
Hello Acclue,
I have a ThinkPad 365XD with a 120MHz Pentium 1 cpu and 72MB of RAM which is running Tiny Core Linux http://www.tinycorelinux.net. Tiny Core runs fine on this laptop other than a few apps such as wbar (due to illegal operation). Since the CD Drive is not bootable, I used Smart Boot Manager and booted via floppy using the Smart Boot Manager floppy install [sbminst]. Smart Boot Manager can be found at: http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/about.html. My laptop has many functions including editor (file editor), fluff (file manager), MPlayer-nodeps (music player), News (RSS news feed reader}, Seamonkey 1.1.19 (fastest and least memory use browser out of 12 tried), and wifi (a ultra small wifi manager). |
I ran gentoo (1.4?) on mine with xfce4. It was rock solid. Also had Eclipse installed and working. Wireless networking was a problem that never got resolved.
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Linux on old IBM laptop
Looking for some info on the best distro to run on a IBM ThinkPad 760 laptop. Any ideas anyone?
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Alright, thanks all, sorry I disappeared there, I got really sick the last couple days. Grabbed a cdrw earlier today and booted it up with damn small linux. Working great. Thanks for the help.
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Good to hear. I think people may be interested in your experiences as you go, too. If you think of it, maybe post an update in a while or especially if you move on for some reason. And maybe get more RAM :)
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Cant say if it will work or not....but heres a newer version of Puppy (5.25 Retro) built with an older Kernel. Nowhere near as old as that laptop...but it still might work. For Install that is... forget running live CDs with hardly any memory. http://puppylinuxnews.org/puplets/ol...cid-puppy-525/
NVM.... I noticed a post on the 5.25 retro page from someone with a 600E that says 525 retro didnt work. Mightve even been you! LOL! My bad! |
Hello acclue,
you could try slitaz. It is bootable from a floppy drive. i would call it "the swiss army distro" due to the multiple features it offers. i think also mac gywer would use it, if in trouble. have a nice day! stbn |
I might be tempted to run qnx on it.
Be careful on that cd drive. It will not read cd-rw's and will have issues with many cd-r disks. I used to use the black cd-r are always burn iso at the very slowest speeds. It may be possible to add in some ram. Might look at slitaz too. |
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