Linux for my Thinkpad i series 1200-1161

[Thinkpaduser72]

I resurrected this old Thinkpad with a 500MHZ Celeron, 16 GB CF card as an HDD, 512 MB RAM and am running it with Windows 98 successfully. I want a more modern OS and am trying to install Linux on it. I have tried unsuccessfully to run the following distros with Live CD for the smaller ones and with Live USB for the ones too large for a CD.

Mint 16
Mint 12
PCLinuxOS
Antix 13.2
Puppy 4.3.1

I tried all of these first on my desktop, (Dell GX-260, 2.26GHZ. 2.0 GB RAM), and they all installed and ran fine. None of them would run on the Thinkpad. They would all install until the final step when the desktop would not appear and the screen would be stuck.

Does anybody have any insight into what could be going wrong here? Thank you in advance.

[ilakast]

When the liveCD loads and you are presented with the list options, highlight the "run live Cd" option and press e (e for edit). Then you will be presented with a screen showing the boot options. Find the line with the word 'quiet', delete it and press F10 (I think. Just read the shortcuts for booting at the bottom).

This will get stuck again, but at least will show you the boot log sequence and be able to see where it gets stuck.

Now, you can additionally try adding the word 'noapic' on the same line where the quiet was and see if it boots. Hope that helps.

[Thinkpaduser72]

Thanks for the suggestions. I deleted the "quiet" from the boot code but it didn't make any difference.

Now, you can additionally try adding the word 'noapic' on the same line where the quiet was and see if it boots. Hope that helps.

Do you mean noacpi?

I tried various other boot options but to no avail.

[ilakast]

Try both noapic and acpi=off (if you haven't already). When removing the quiet option, did it get immediately stuck or did it proceed with booting for a while and then got stuck? If these boot options don't do the trick, then I am out of ideas unfortunately...

[Thinkpaduser72]

I tried both noapic and acpi=off together and it still stuck at the very end of the installation. I'm beginning to wonder if it is recognizing the RAM, (512MB). If not, could that explain what's happening?

[Thinkpaduser72]

I replaced the 512MB RAM with the original 128MB and was able to run Linux Puppy 4.3.1. This old Thinkpad just won't recognize the 512MB RAM. I will probably use this distro unless I can figure out some way to get it to recognize the 512MB RAM. I wonder if a BIOS upgrade would accomplish this? Any thoughts?

[Neil]

I'm not very familiar with the i series 1200, but doesn't it have 32 or 64MB RAM on the system board and only 1 expansion slot, that supports up to another 128MB officially and 256MB unofficial? And I'm guessing that with a 256MB DIMM installed the system doesn't recognise the full amount, but can only use 256MB total. At least that's the way I read the Thinkwiki page.

I think most of the distro's you've tried require at least 512MB for the installers to run. Puppy is a pretty decent distro, but if you want something more Debian, I would give AntiX a try.

[ilakast]

I didn't focus on the hardware part you mentioned in your first post; 512MB is out of the question indeed. According to www.lenovo.com/psref/pdf/tiwbook.pdf the maximum is 192MB RAM. There's no way to bypass RAM limits with any BIOS update whatsoever. I had an i-series 1400 and had a 256MB max limit but run debian nicely