Linux on old laptops

So they tossed out an IBM ThinkPad 600E at work and I scarfed it on the way to the dumpster. It was stripped: no floppy, no hard drive, the CMOS battery was dead and the main battery was missing. This model doesn't have any USB ports, but it does have a pair of PCMCIA slots. It did have a CD-ROM drive...

I wonder if this thing will run Linux? So I hie me over to the Puppy Linux web page and start downloading Live-CD images. Using Nero on my Windows XP Pro machine, I burn several CD-ROMs to try them out. In particular, I look at 2.14 and 2.15CE.

I boot the thing up using a power supply I use with my ThinkPad 380ED and it boots but man is it ugly. The resolution that Puppy chose is clearly wrong. It also takes forever and I soon see why: the thing has been stripped of it's RAM, leaving only 32MB installed! I do a quick re-think and decide to try Puppy on the 380ED first - it has 80+MB of RAM!

The 380ED is a Pentium MMX 166. It has an integrated floppy and CD-ROM drive as well as PCMCIA. No USB. I use this particular machine as a logging computer for my amateur radio contesting. It runs a legal version of Windows 98 and I'm quite happy with it for this use. The 9 pin serial port is very valuable for hooking up to a GPS receiver.

So through various trial and errors, I figure out that the resolution is 800 x 600 x 16. 35.1562KHz with a 56.25Hz refresh. It takes quite a few probes to work out the one I can read, but it's not so bad. Once Puppy 2.14 loads, I see that there's 35M of RAM free. That doesn't bode well for a machine that only has 32MB of RAM! The next step was to try to get the PCMCIA Ethernet card working. It turns out that I loaded 2 modules: pcsnet_cs and axnet_cs and that was the combination that finally did the trick. Since that machine has a hard drive, I let Puppy store its configuration file there for future use.

Then, back to the 600E. The 800 x 600 x 16 worked and so did the drivers, but man is it ever slow. The monitor window shows 11.6M free, but the CD drive just keeps trundling and it takes a long, long time to load the browser (Seamonkey.) It's a 2645-4AU, dated 09/1999. Pentium II 366MHz. It's taking so long to load Seamonkey that I'm going to post this and see if it comes up by tomorrow...

There's an excellent ThinkPad specifications web page here. IBM has a PDF describing the details of their discontinued 'numbered' models here.