A good friend of mine gave me his old Thinkpad 390x that had been sitting around collecting dust. The system itself has 128MB ram, around 6G disc space, cd-rom drive, 2 pcmcia slots, 1 usb, floppy disc drive & an internal 56k modem. So first things first I downloaded, burned and started the slackware installation for the system.
[Setup & Installation]
At the main menu just press enter to you get to the console and run fdisk or cfdisk. I prefer cfdisk being that you can always see what's going on unlike fdisk where you have to constantly do p to see what partitions you've created. Now for some strange reason when I create a bunch of partitions that is: swap, root, var, tmp, usr & home - the installation fails somewhere mid-way through the usrsecond disc. So I just decided to create a partition of 257mb and one huge root partition which I don't recommend anyone else do if they don't have to for security & administrative reasons.
[Configuring X windows]
After a fresh install of Slackware X windows will not run because the settings are not correct by default I'm guessing. So just run xorgconfig and accept all the default values and then for the horizontal refresh rate enter 31.5 - 57.0 (#7) and 50-90 (#2) for the vertical sync range. On the next screen when asked to see a list of cards say yes and type in 351 for NeoMagic (laptop/notebook) which should be good enough for X windows.
[Sound Card]
This one you don't need to worry about; works right after the installation.
[Internal Modem]
'lspci' shows that this laptop has a Agere Systems Winmodem 56k. Now if you've ever tried to get winmodems working with linux in the past you know it's a pain in the ass, but fear not I did some googling on the modem and linux and there is a program called "martian" that pretty much makes life so much easier for you if you need to use the modem. Just do a google search on the string 'martian+agere+linux'. Afterwards I decided to install wvdial to make dialing out simple without having to manually configure ppp scripts and what not. In order to install 'wvdial' it turns out that you need to have 'wvstreams' installed as well. So all you must do is d/l and install 'wvstreams' then 'wvdial'. After that is done with remember to have 'martian_modem' running before running 'wvdialconf' or else it won't work. Now you have a working modem and you'll be able to dial in to your favorite BBS or ISP if that's how you get about going online.
[Wireless Modem]
Simple as downloading ndiswrapper, installing driver for modem and setting up connection to access point. I could go into more details, but being that the 390x doesn't come with a wireless card it would be pointless; all I have to say about this is I was lucky enough to get ahold of a Linksys PCMCIA wireless card and I was able to set it up to work with Slackware and go online in less then 10 minutes. Do your research first online as to which cards are compatible with Slackware/Linux first before going out and buying or getting a pcmcia wireless card. I was fortunate enough for the card I got for free to work right off the bat!
[Updating Packages]
For updating the packages on Slackware I just used a program called 'swaret'. It does the job so I'm not complaining. Just download the tgz file and installpkg it. Then rename swaret.conf.new to swaret.conf or just copy it; same thing. Then set the version to current by typing 'swaret --set VERSION=current'. Then finally run 'swaret --update' and 'swaret --upgrade -a' and your pretty much done. Now if you want swaret to run on a regular basis for instance every week then just create a script that run's 'swaret --update' & 'swaret --upgrade -a' within the preferred /etc/cron.* folders.
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I guess that pretty much sums it up everything else is now in your hands to learn. I too am still learning new things about linux on a daily basis. If you can't figure something out someone probably already did if not then someone probably will. Remember there is a vast amount of information online regarding linux more so then any other system IMHO so don't give up if you become stuck on something. Time permitting I will try to update this page in regards to my dealing with this system.
http://slack390x.blogspot.com/
