First caveat about Arch Linux 32 is that 'wifi-menu' is not present, so I would suggest to use the RJ45 jack on the T43 to complete the setup.
====How to install Arch Linux 32 on a T43/T43p====
- timedatectl set-ntp true
Note: I cannot get this working on my T43p, not sure why. Too lazy to troubleshoot, perhaps someone could spill the beans as to why. - lsblk
Note: to list all of the disks, most probably your HDD will land on sda - cfdisk /dev/sda
Note: assuming sda is your hard disk, change this accordingly - Delete all of the partitions if the disk isn't freshly formatted
- partition size: 128M, primary partition, set Bootflag (B)
- partition size: (rest of space), primary partition
- Make sure you WRITE the changes afterwards, else they'll be lost and you'll have to redo them. If the disk wasn't preformatted and you've manually deleted the partitions, you may still get some false-positives later on about Windows volume names but that can be ignored. And of course remember to see the bootflag (B) for the 128M boot partition.
Note: since we're going to use GRUB, a 128M partition size is fine (make it larger if you're going to use something else around these instructions), and then the rest of the disk can be allocated for the data partition. I'm not into swapfiles so I'm not going to bother, but you could create one and add it to taste as needed. - mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1
- mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda2
Note: here we're just formatting both partitions as EXT4, of course you could choose another file system like IBM JFS if you're going to go true blue. - mount /dev/sda2 /mnt
- mkdir /mnt/boot
- mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot
Note: this portion configures the boot partition's mount point. - pacstrap /mnt base base-devel linux linux-firmware nano
Note: and this command installs the main stuff we need, I'm going with nano instead of vim because I'm a heretick, but feel free to replace 'nano' with vim if you're into that sort of thing. - genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab
Note: once everything is installed from pacstrap that will configure fstab. - arch-chroot /mnt /bin/bash
- pacman -S networkmanager grub
- systemctl enable NetworkManager
Note: installing NetworkManage and GRUB, along with enabling NetworkManager (and yes, it's case sensitive so installing it is lower-case, and then enabling it has capitalization on the start of each word). - grub-install /dev/sda
- grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
- nano /etc/locale.gen
Note: uncomment which language you want (probably the en_US UTF & ISO). - nano /etc/locale.conf
- LANG=en_US.UTF-8
Note: you will be adding whichever language you chose, in my case I chose US, so it would be "LANG=en_US.UTF-8". - nano /etc/hostname
Note: put whatever hostname you want in and save, i.e. 'archibm' or 'T43p' or 'potatoibm'. - ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Canada/Pacific /etc/localtime
Note: you will want to specify the values that are corresponding to *your* local time zone, you can use tab complete to go show the country/city when adding in the first bit. - Exit & reboot, and that should be all
I'm still customizing mine but there's one particular package that can be used to under-volt the Pentium M, this would allow the machine to run cooler (and it's not like Arch Linux needs much resources):
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/phc-intel
I couldn't find anything for the AMD-ATi FireGL, but if someone was so inclined they probably could make a special utility. Unfortunately that's outside of my expertise and how much I care.
For my particular setup I'm not going to be installing a desktop environment as it will be exclusively TMUX, but there are plenty of other tutorials on that.