Thinkpads Forum

This was, and is, a very nice and small and compact and light old computer.
OK, bad res, no CD- no floppy- No usb in the boot sequence. But I'll get it on.
What Linux do you recommend as easy to learn and a low consumer for this old girl ?
233 Mhz Pentium, 64 Mb Ram.
Thanks !!

Here's a few distros I'd look at:

Puppy Linux: Very small, very lightweight, pretty popular. With 64 MB RAM you'll probably need to look at versions prior to 1.0.2

Dam Small Linux: Only 16 MB RAM required 64 MB recommended, so it may be a good fit for your specs.

TinyMe: Sorry, don't know much about it, but I've heard good things

Xubuntu: The RAM requirements (128 MB I think) put this out of reach, but if you did upgrade to more memory, this might be a good fit. Still fairly lightweight and (IMO) Ubuntu is fairly good starting point for Linux.

Regarding install, I think you're basically stuck with either using PCMCIA or a network boot. Whichever distro you go with, I'd check out their wiki/FAQ/etc. to see if they have any tips. Also, I'd look at http://www.thinkwiki.org for help on installing with older hardware. It *should* be as simple as downloading an image of the distro to a PCMCIA device and then booting from it, but it may depend on your distro of choice.

Thanks lots ! I'll work on those and get back after
the weekend.

If you are considering an upgrade of the memory to 96 MB, than I could recomend Vector Linux and Debian (with Xcfe desktop) - I was using them on a similar 560X (only I had 96 MB of RAM).

Superego wrote:Regarding install, I think you're basically stuck with either using PCMCIA or a network boot.

Not necesary - providing that you have another machine with Linux you can use a program called UNetbootin - http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ you can boot the instaler of a hard disk (of course you will need a network card to complete the instalation, as UNetbootin places only the network instalation versions of various Linux distros)- just read the instructions on the page (do not use the Windows version of the tool to do this trick - you need to create Linux partitions on the hard drive and windows cannot see those).

Thanks- I've tried two different sticks of ram to upgrade it
but they were rejected. I am going to try DSL on a usb drive.
Took forever to find an old one that has drivers for W98.
I found a tutorial and installers here:

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/all-in-one-usb-dsl/

I hope it doesnt need to boot from the pendrive cause I don't think
it will.

I'm not really up on the 560X, but I think it might require low-density RAM. I know some of the older ThinkPads are very picky about RAM. Check in the ThinkPad Legacy Hardware forum for specifics.

The problem with RAM on the 560X is that it requires older EDO RAM, and parangles probably used ordinary SDRAM memories (they fit in the SO-DIMM slot). Also, the 560X does not boot from USB, so I wouldn't even bother with the flash-disk DSL distro. Either you transplant the disk into another machine and install linux from there, or you use the method I posted earlier (alternatively if you have a floppy disk drive, you could find a linux network installer on floppies - I think Debian still has them).

Thanks to all for your help - I've decided its not worth it.
I want to try Linux but I'll do it on something else.