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:

1. I had to make sure that the kernel wasn't too new
2. I had to burn the iso onto a cd of the right type in order to get the system to boot from it (this took a while to find)
3. I had to make sure that I was using the right boot system (syslinux vs isolinux for a livecd)

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.

Linux on old IBM laptop
 

Looking for some info on the best distro to run on a IBM ThinkPad 760 laptop. Any ideas anyone?

Since we don't know any laptop out there some specs would help (RAM and CPU at most).

Yep read the thread and others like it which has posts like mine (post 3) and TobiSGD (quoted below for your elucidation) and then tell us what the machines specs are.

Don't you mean at least? ;)

Yeah, sorry, seems that I had a knot in my mind.

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.

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 :)

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.