For no good reason, other than curiosity, I wanted to install Linux on an ancient IBM thinkpad 240 maxed out with 192M (!) of dram and a 10G hard drive. I was able to install Ubuntu 9.04 on it, but with some work. The laptop will not boot from its USB (1.0!) port automatically. I had in the past taken the drive out, put it in a desktop, and use that configuration to load OSes. This time, I was able to modify the autoexec.bat file on a wakepup floppy to point to the correct vmlinuz and image files on the USB attached CD (the floppy for Ubuntu didn't recognize it, and neither did smart boot manager) That worked well enough, and 9.04 run okay, if slowly. I then upgraded the machine to 9.10. It did nothing but swap, totally thrashing, just running the OS with no applications. No happiness there. I then tried Damn Small Linux, but it wouldn't recognize the video modes and I couldn't find a workable VGA cheat code. Knoppix was up next, with similar results. Puppy Linux installed without a hitch and that's what the machine is running now...
Overall, too much time spent for too little gain. Should have surplussed the machine and bought a $200 slightly more capable used machine. FWIW.
2 comments:
Try this one:
http://tiny.seul.org/en/
I had it on a Dell Latitude CP 233MHz with 64MB Ram. It runs Dansguardian without a hitch. Even with only a 10mbit PCMCIA card.
Cool! I'll check it out...
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