After weeks of trying to find a ThinkPad to use for Linux and having no joy I have won five in the last week - a 770, 755CX, 380ED, 380ED & 760XL.
I have decided to keep the two 380EDs and resell the rest.
One of them is for my wife so she can wirelessly surf while watching TV, but she is not interested in Linux and will be running Windows 98SE or 2000.
Bearing in mind the age of the machine, what's the best distro to use for a Linux newbie?
I don't want to dual boot or to run anything too heavy on it. I want it for wireless surfing, emails, light word processing and expanding my knowledge of Linux. I know it is old, but I would like it to run pretty smoothly.
I am fairly new to Linux and would prefer a distro with a GUI, but know that Gnome or KDE are resource hungry. I have been running Vector Linux SOHO live on my wifes PC and it seems pretty easy on resources and uses Xfce desktop manager, it also has special ThinkPad tailored settings.
I have also dabbled in DSL, Knoppix and Ubuntu - the last requiring a better machine than the 380ED.
I have an 802.11b wireless PCMCIA card which apparently works in Linux according to the box.
So the ultimate question is, which distro will run relatively smooth, work on a 380ED, work with my wireless PCMCIA card and is pretty user friendly and configurable via GUI and not too much Linux knowledge initially.
One final question, does anyone know the max hard drive and RAM you can put into a 380ED. Kind Regards
Simon Royal
---- www.simonroyal.co.uk The box said requires Windows 2000 or better, so I bought an Apple Mac
Many years ago Adam introduced me to Debian, but while its much easier to install these days its not really ready for my mum and other non teck savvy users, so I should recommend ubuntu, and then replacing gnome desktop with icewm to reduce the load.
Good luck, Linux is fun but a little background reading about operating systems will help loads. I recommend reading a little book called gate networks and operating systems by Andrew talenbaum as it will help you know a little OS theory (Bias toward UNIX derivatives) while introducing you to most of what makes a computer run in clear English.
I would recommend Debian but ubuntu auto detects most hardware and for a newbie the things that make me think ubuntu is evil will not be found by you before you change Linux distro anyway
Regards
Owen
PS I work full time with redhat derivatives which benifit from a transactional package manager over debian's non transactional package management. Ubuntu is like debian but without such strict packaging.
On Tue, 25 Apr 2006 11:02:17 +0100 Simon Royal s.royal@totalise.co.uk wrote:
After weeks of trying to find a ThinkPad to use for Linux and having no joy I have won five in the last week - a 770, 755CX, 380ED, 380ED & 760XL.
I have decided to keep the two 380EDs and resell the rest.
One of them is for my wife so she can wirelessly surf while watching TV, but she is not interested in Linux and will be running Windows 98SE or 2000.
Bearing in mind the age of the machine, what's the best distro to use for a Linux newbie?
I don't want to dual boot or to run anything too heavy on it. I want it for wireless surfing, emails, light word processing and expanding my knowledge of Linux. I know it is old, but I would like it to run pretty smoothly.
I am fairly new to Linux and would prefer a distro with a GUI, but know that Gnome or KDE are resource hungry. I have been running Vector Linux SOHO live on my wifes PC and it seems pretty easy on resources and uses Xfce desktop manager, it also has special ThinkPad tailored settings.
I have also dabbled in DSL, Knoppix and Ubuntu - the last requiring a better machine than the 380ED.
I have an 802.11b wireless PCMCIA card which apparently works in Linux
according to the box.
So the ultimate question is, which distro will run relatively smooth, work on a 380ED, work with my wireless PCMCIA card and is pretty user friendly and configurable via GUI and not too much Linux knowledge initially.
One final question, does anyone know the max hard drive and RAM you can put into a 380ED. Kind Regards
Simon Royal
www.simonroyal.co.uk The box said requires Windows 2000 or better, so I bought an Apple Mac
main@lists.alug.org.uk http://www.alug.org.uk/ http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above!
Owen Synge wrote:
Many years ago Adam introduced me to Debian, but while its much easier to install these days its not really ready for my mum and other non teck savvy users, so I should recommend ubuntu, and then replacing gnome desktop with icewm to reduce the load.
Via this LUG, I picked up a reference to Zenwalk (www.zenwalk.org) the other day. I had a quick peek at the site, and downloaded the full ISO. With that, I had a fully functioning, nice and fast, XFCE desktop on an old P3 (Packard Bell Imedia, YUK!) with 128meg running in less than 15 mins. It would take a bit longer to get KDE or Gnome on it I expect, and it'd be slower, but I was EXTREMELY impressed with it. From what I can gather, it's slackware based, and does have a packaging system that works well, if the choice is still a little limited. It's definitely worth a look-see.
Cheers, Laurie.
Laurie Brown wrote:
Via this LUG, I picked up a reference to Zenwalk (www.zenwalk.org) the other day. I had a quick peek at the site, and downloaded the full ISO. With that, I had a fully functioning, nice and fast, XFCE desktop on an old P3 (Packard Bell Imedia, YUK!) with 128meg running in less than 15 mins. It would take a bit longer to get KDE or Gnome on it I expect, and it'd be slower, but I was EXTREMELY impressed with it. From what I can gather, it's slackware based, and does have a packaging system that works well, if the choice is still a little limited. It's definitely worth a look-see.
That was probably me. I have it on an old 1 gig celeron with 128 RAM and it faily zips along. Most of the gnome stuff is already there - it's mainly the kde stuff that has been stripped out - so a gnome desktop should not be too hard to get going. Personally I much prefer xfce. It is slackware based which is good for me because my other PC rune slack 10.2 so configuration is near identical.
Zenwalk's hardware detection is excellent (better than slackware), it has a current 2.6x kernel and the appfinder is a godsend. I love it.
ian
I have a dozen NICs to dispose of. Some ISA and some PCI - one is I think for a laser printer.
Ian
-
Ian bell -
Laurie Brown -
Owen Synge -
Simon Royal