Hi Well, yet another day and a different distro. This poor little ThinkPad is being put under a lot of work, I have tried about 8 distros on this thing. I was running Puppy Linux and while it was nice and fast, it was a bit basic. I tried Fluxbuntu last night and after getting past the dodgy screen res, I just didn't get on with it. It might be Ubuntu based but it is still quite ropey. So I downloaded the Xubuntu 9.10 alternative installer - as the standard Xubuntu disc wouldn't install - and started the install last night. It took about 90 minutes which was ok. I must say I am quite impressed. It gives the ease of use of Ubuntu and all the software packages it comes with and are available for it. I know a couple of people said not to install it because it would run quite badly, but it isn't too bad. Booting is a little slow - although quicker than I thought it would be and there isn't too much lag navigating around the system. I only use this machine for surfing and writing, so nothing too intense. With only 160MB of RAM it isn't going to do anything too processor intensive, but with a little more in it could be quite a capable machine under Xubuntu. I have just installed Google Chrome browser and it is whizzing along surfing pages.
Simon Royal
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Simon Royal wrote:
I must say I am quite impressed. It gives the ease of use of Ubuntu and all the software packages it comes with and are available for it. I know a couple of people said not to install it because it would run quite badly, but it isn't too bad. Booting is a little slow - although quicker than I thought it would be and there isn't too much lag navigating around the system.
I only use this machine for surfing and writing, so nothing too intense. With only 160MB of RAM it isn't going to do anything too processor intensive, but with a little more in it could be quite a capable machine under Xubuntu.
Ram will help, the slowest machine I have had xubuntu running on was a fujitsu subnotebook which had a fixed 256MB of ram and a 1Ghz Transmeta Crusoe CPU (probably not that much faster than your 300mhz chip) and that was bearable.
However it might be hard/expensive to obtain now and I think your machine only supports 128MB in each slot and there was 32MB of non-removable. So depending on if you currently have two 64MB modules or one 128 you need to find either one or two 128MB PC66 SODIMMS to take it to the max of 288MB.
The hard drive upgrade might not make as much difference as you have seen on other machines, I'd research what ATA level the IDE interface is running at first. Anyway if you can upgrade the ram you'll be in swap slightly less so I'd do that first.
Look in /etc/fstab and see what mount options you are using on the filesystem. I'd probably recommend ext2 over something with journaling for that machine (it's possible to convert back from ext3 without a reformat).
Then in the mount options for / (assuming the default partitioning scheme) I'd add noatime to minimise writes by not stamping the file access times. You may have the option relatime at the moment. Which is better than the old default atime but on limited hardware I'd take that out and replace it with noatime.
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Simon Royal -
Wayne Stallwood