Thinkpads Forum

i rarely do this but i havent' been so hyped about a computer in a long time. my sig lists it. not a bad deal at all i might say. yes it's O L D and s....low......... but i won't be running more than an audio player, vid player, firefox and maybe a word processor so i think i'll be ok. will upgrade to 512mb ram most definitely though.

now i simply must make the excrutiating desicion of whether to go with linux or xp (i have xp cd and gentoo universal cd); oh the decisions!! so you say: well, just dual boot! but it's not a good idea for me because either one or the other will hold all my music files (40gb of FLAC worth) which i will be using foobar2000 and sending to a USB dac i'll be DIY'ing shortly. from dac to cmoy amp from amp to headphones. and i want to listen while surfing net etc. and going back and forth is just no good. arghhhh................anyone think i'll notice a BIG speed increase in these simple desktop apps in linux over windows?

Make a shareable partition that holds your tunes. It can be FAT32 if you need to read and write from both OSes or NTFS if you can stand read-only or want to try writing from Linux.

The bad news is that Linux apps tend to be slower than the best Windows apps, but that's not stopping me from trying to build a Windows-free system here...

yeah, you will probably feel a slow down more than increase and unless you want to tweak your system, patch kernel, remove unnecessary modules and services etc. Even when you do that, windows is a graphical operating system with entire API set, used by most windows apps, linux has X, which will never be as fast as windows. speed in X is not why one would choose linux. Just get yourself a life cd of some distro somewhere and boot from it and see how it works.

Okay, I'm REALLY new to Linux, but years ago worked with a similar control system called OS-9. It was the same way -- really pakced kernel that you added drivers/modules/commands/etc. to as needed. For really limited systems like you're talking about we used to write a simple text screen menu that would load on boot and run from there. Just choose the app and go. There was still the command line prompt, but we'd strip the system of everything except what was needed for the particular set of apps. If you wanted to do something different you could just load the command set you needed from the HD. In OS-9 you could merge commands into a single file then load and unload those files. Of course if you unloaded a merged set you lost all the commands in that set. But we'd make several sets, some with repeated commands, then name them according to what they were used for. If you wanted to fool proof the system put those extra command sets on a floppy or a protected partition. Can't accidently format the HD if the format command isn't available! I don't know if Linux is quite that modular yet. I really just started playing with it a bit!

I can certainly understand your excitement; my T21 probably hasn't even been taken out of the warehouse yet, much less shipped to me.

I've been using Linux on my desktops for a few months, and particularly had my heart set on a thinkpad for my first laptop because of how linux-friendly they are. I use Dam* Small Linux [/url]http://www.[censored].org on my main desktop and would definite ... y Linux: http://www.goosee.com/puppy/[url]

Both of these can run from CD while you're checking them out and can be downloaded relatively easily over a 56K connection.

HTH

Don't forget BeatrIX!!

based on ubuntu, has Gaim, Abiword, Firefox (maybe Dillo, but i'm not sure. probably firefox), and hooks up to the Ubuntu (Warty?) repositories...

it's basically a custom LiveCD installer for Ubuntu, with all the wholesome goodness apps included

try it out!

(and yes, the developer is obsessed with cats)