In all honesty I think you are wasting your time and money.

I didn't check out the Thinkpad but the Compaq maxes out at what 320MB ?

Even if you go for a distro with a lightweight desktop environment you still probably want to run a modern browser etc, that laptop is still last century's technology and to be honest needs to go in the bin.

Another problem with these machines is that nobody is testing the modern distros against them because they are so old they are off the radar now, so you have to expect issues with buggy ACPI etc as the foo that made that machine work might have fallen out of the kernel and nobody cared. At least with modern hardware there is a high chance that someone else has tried to run the same distro on the same machine and reported bugs etc.

I mean I know you said you have very limited funds to work with..but what you have spent on that umax plus buying either of these and did you buy the original thinkpads ? You wouldn't be that far off from a 2nd hand Netbook or sommin else a bit more recent. I mean even if you are managing to stuff what doesn't work back on ebay and sell for what you paid you are still losing postage costs and sellers fees no ?

I don't mean to sound overly negative here, but I just can't stand seeing someone with limited funds waste more money. I'd say try to save up £100 and see what that gets you...If you dump what you have so far back on ebay you might get halfway there.

Hi,

On 31 July 2010 09:47, Simon Royal simonroyal@live.co.uk wrote:

Im not sure of the Compaq Armada M300.

Since you are endlessly struggling with this [*], I've googled and found you these sites that should be of use to you:

http://www.linux-laptop.net/ http://www.linlap.com/wiki/laptops

http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/compaq.html

the above one has a number of reports on the compaq model such as:

http://www.lrr.in.tum.de/~acher/m300/

http://www.mondoinfo.com/linux240x.html for the Thinkpad.

Bear in mind that some of these are from Redhat 6 / 7 days, so it's likely to be talking about old kernels and old hardware support. How newer distros handle old hardware is anyone's guess. Personally, I should say that besides possible performance issues (newer software tends to do more and is more shiny), things should stay roughly the same. But don't be surprised if some hardware supported in those old days no longer works on modern distros as obsolete source code is sometimes removed.

Good luck, Srdjan

{*} - would it not be better use of your time and money (betting on ebay for hardware you are not sure will work correctly or be supported), to save up for a while and get a semi-decent new laptop where things are likely to work more smoothly?