Thinkpads Forum

having trouble putting ANY version of LInux on my 760 XL.

with 32 meg ram
and a 6 GIG hard drive

with NO CD-ROM other then a pcmcia drive
and a linksys 802.11b nic card.

I got knoppix to run on a pcmcia cd-rom, with floppy drivers, so far thats the only one so far. but it requires a 2 GB root partition to install to hard disk, so thats out.

redhat, debian, SuSe, etc, I can't get to detect the linksys 802.11b pcmcia card, or the pcmcia cd-rom.

and 32 meg with a 2 1 GIG drive is not enough for windows either,
so I'm kinda up a greek as to what to use this laptop for. I can't seem to do a darn thing with it, its driving me nutts. I can't put a kernel on it of any kind without running into some problem.

any suggestions?

If I could find a 6 GIG 12.5 mm hard drive, and some more ram, on it I could put knoppix on it, but i can't seem to find one on ebay, or when I do I get outbid and loose the auction to someone else. has happened over a dozen times already.

if I can just find a notebook computer I can use that doesn't cost $300+ I'd be happy, but, even the older laptops are $300+

You should be able to pick up a 570 for $300.00 and they run Linux pretty good.

If knoppix can boot, so should the other distributions. You might need additional driver (floppy)disks to recognize your exotic cdrom, look around on the install cd.

If all else fails, there is always network install.

Obviously the machine is not enough for the latest & greatest gnome/kde, but emacs+latex, say, will run decently.

I got Knoppix to boot, using the pcmcia floppy disks.

probme was, I needed a 2 GB free partition to install knoppix to the hard drive, and I have been unable to find another hard drive for the 760 XL.

all the places I've checked are out of 'em. I've never tried putting a 9.5 mm drive, so I don't know if it will work or not. a 6 GB would work,
and if I could put another 64 meg in there I could get X and xfce and firefox to work ok, if I can find the hardware..

I tried a network install, but these distros don't detect the Linksys 802.11b pcmcia wifi card. I don't know why, none of 'em seem to.