Thinkpads Forum

I am thinking of running Puppy Linux on my ThinkPad T21 as it has a minimal footprint, what with it being an old laptop and all. Any pointers? What are the main pitfalls?

First of all I hope you enjoy your experience. Secondly, Puppy is a decent and fairly intuitive operating system but not as easy as say Linux Mint or PCLinuxOS. How much RAM do you have? If you have over 256, I'd say you can move up to PCLinuxOS with no problems. I've ran it on several systems with your specs and its flawless, and an easy transition into Linux... and most of everything you'll need is already there...

But if you like Puppy, I've found it very good Out of Box with wireless and most other things. My biggest piece of advice is don't be discouraged by how different installing software 'seems'. This aspect of Linux was the biggest hurdle for me... everything else is great (for the most part... all software has quirks).

Good luck and let us know how things turn out.

The main pitfall is the user interface. It is pretty basic but it is useful. It has to be really basic to keep with the un-bloated scheme that puppy has. Otherwise it is a lightning fast, solid distro. You probably won't find anything that runs faster than puppy does. It is a little limited in available software but it is a good start in a lightweight, fast linux environment. a great chioce for older hardware.
If you don't like the user interface then try one of the bigger distros. They will be slower but they will look nicer and have more software available for installation.
As always, run it in live cd mode for a while to get a feel for the distro before installing it to the hard drive. The only advantage to installing puppy is a faster startup time since puppy loads and runs entirely from memory and you can save your changes back to the cd when shutting down if running multi-session puppy.

It's jolly exciting loading a new O/S from CD! One question. What module should I load for a Zoom 4412 PCMCIA card? I assumed it was Prism54, which does detect a new interface but so far unable to connect.

Puppy is good for booting from a Live CD when you have to do something in Linux, but if this will be your main system I'd say go with something more...substantial. Try Xubuntu or something else fairly light. You might also try older versions of popular distros, since they might run better on you older machine.

I'd get something more supported with a larger community. You want your laptop to actually do stuff. kubuntu actually runs fine on my machine and its slower than a t21.

Hey fleamourian - I would try Xubuntu on your T21 - I had a T22 with 512MB RAM and it worked beautifully. Plus, it's well supported being part of the Ubuntu ecosystem.

Cheerz guys. I have found the most troublesome factor depends on your brand of wireless card. Mint doesn't seem to support my Zoom 4412, but Puppy should, though doesn't currently!

Puppy is not a bad distro and does have a fine, very supportive community. You will probably find that is runs quite nicely on a Thinkpad whether you run it in "live" mode, or with a frugal install, or with a full install, or remastered to a USB stick.

It has its differences from other distros, not all of which are bad. The biggest problem I have with it is that, like some others, it tends to install with a default root user. Bad practice, bad security, bad news if you run it routinely - especially under a full install scenario.

I have a T20 with 384MB RAM on which I run Kubuntu 7.10. It runs well and is quite stable even with big apps such as OpenOffice.org. I don't do heavy graphic editing - the T20 isn't a good platform for that anyway. The worst problem I've ever had is with the Broadcom based wifi card, but it runs well with the firmware that was installed under fw-cutter. I don't know what wifi chip the Zoom 4412 uses, but the worst that could happen is you'll need ndiswrapper, and that's still not a bad thing.

Well its been a while but Puppy did not work out, I had my Puppy blinkers on & did not pay much attention to ppls suggestions at the time. But after a failed DSL Linux installs I reread this post & am now downloading Xubuntu as a result. Thanks for your suggestions of where to go next. Hopefully it'll work this time!

Xubuntu should serve you well. When I installed it on my 600X everything worked except for the ACPI features. Those were fixed with a couple kernel options.

Wireless cards and Modems have both been sore spots in Linux connectivity. So figuring out exactly what chipset the wireless card has helps a lot.

Make sure the wireless card is plugged in during the Xubuntu install, and it will increase the chances of success--adding the drivers after the install is not quite as easy.

Xubuntu tends to be a little tricker than Ubuntu because they forego some packages and substitute some lighter ones, so sometimes you get some things that work in Ubuntu but not in Xubuntu. This usually isn't the case, though, and it's not hard to get it figured out when it is.

yeah, i too recommend xubuntu, i put it on t22 with 256 ram; installation from liveCD took ages so i just gave up and went for minimal installation and that went just fine - http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/minimal (there's something about that url... )

i also tried mint xfce edition but at the time of installation (about a year ago) there was some bug in it that prevented me from installing it; there should be new xfce edition of mint coming out soon so give it a go

hey, my vote goes for xubuntu for a newcomer to linux. just about everything works out of the box. and it's easy to use. i had it on a partition on a low spec laptop and it worked like a dream. a good choice. i also have it on a partition on a new laptop and it runs flawlessly.

I too have used Xubuntu on a variety of earlier model TP's with great sucess.

I bought a few of these cheap PCMCIA wireless cards which are sold for their Linux compatiblility and come recommended.

Saves a lot of fuss and bother with finding drivers etc.

Hey Nick

Thanks for that link. Do they come in black?

fleamourian wrote:Hey Nick

Thanks for that link. Do they come in black?

Unfortunately all colours except black

My favourite is the limited edition commemorative one in Team GB colours with the gold band around it - shame that only us Brits with ".co.uk's" can actually access that page

Sorry for the frivolity....

The part of the card which sticks out is black.

Haha!

That's OK then!

Is it possible to triple boot a PC? I mean three operating systems. I imagine configuring the boot loader would be the tricky part, as usually it is a largely automatic process.

Sure you can triple boot, quaduple boot, quintuple boot, ad nauseum.

OK I'll do my research.

the tricky part is having enough space on a laptop drive for 3 oses! i triple booted xp/vista/suse and xp/osx/suse for a couple months on a 80 gb hdd and it always felt very cramped. at school i had a lab pc quad booting xp/vista/osx/ubuntu, but i had plenty of storage there. i found that it was pretty simple to keep grub installed on the linux partition and just use the winnt loader to do the booting. i just dd'ed the first 512 bytes of the linux partition to a bin file and then added a boot.ini entry to reference the file. why not use grub from the mbr, you ask? i find that i switch distros more often than i reinstall windows, so rather than risk rendering both oses unbootable if the install goes wrong, i use ntloader and that way if the new distro doesn't work out or whatever, i still have a working windows install without needing to rescue it with fixmbr or whatever.

gongo2k1 wrote: i find that i switch distros more often than i reinstall windows, so rather than risk rendering both oses unbootable if the install goes wrong...

I've always found it simple enough to repair Grub from a LiveCD, and less headache to setup initially than ntloader.

But what fun would it be if there was only one solution to any problem? Tech support guys would be out of a job

Since I dual boot are there any Windows drivers for the Comtrend card from the Linux Emporium. I am having trouble locating them.