The Most User-friendly Distro for Thinkpad

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#31 Post by **GomJabbar** » Wed Sep 17, 2008 7:25 pm

archer6 wrote:I run Puppy Linux ver. 4.0 on my ThinkPad 600e, and it works really well.
With just 128k ram, and a 10GB hard drive. Puppy ver 4.0 is fast, fun and easy to learn.

On your recommendation I'll have to give it a try on my old 600E that's just laying around. I tried several distros, but was not satisfied with any of them. Either I had booting problems, hardware problems, the OS was too stark, or it ran too slow. I won't be able to work on it for a few weeks though - as I am out of town.

#32 Post by **archer6** » Wed Sep 17, 2008 8:57 pm

GomJabbar wrote:
archer6 wrote:I run Puppy Linux ver. 4.0 on my ThinkPad 600e, and it works really well.
With just 128k ram, and a 10GB hard drive. Puppy ver 4.0 is fast, fun and easy to learn.
On your recommendation I'll have to give it a try on my old 600E that's just laying around. I tried several distros, but was not satisfied with any of them. Either I had booting problems, hardware problems, the OS was too stark, or it ran too slow. I won't be able to work on it for a few weeks though - as I am out of town.

I look forward to your report once you've had a chance to try it out. I'm on a bit of a Linux tear, currently installing some distro on every laptop in sight.....

denisky · #33 Post by **denisky** » Thu Sep 18, 2008 7:54 am

Recently I installed openSuse on my ThinkPad R51e. I think it is a pretty good linux distro with very good hardware detection. I can connect to my wireless router easily, unlike Debian which is so complicated at first install. It also supports web page scrolling, without the need to edit xorg.conf file. Overall I am happy with this distro, and I recommend everybody to try this distro.

rm · #34 Post by rm » Thu Sep 18, 2008 9:03 am

Here is what I have found to be the best ThinkPad T61 distro so far:

http://temporaryland.wordpress.com/2008 ... nkpad-t61/

http://temporaryland.wordpress.com/2008 ... 61-part-2/

muffd · #35 Post by **muffd** » Thu Sep 18, 2008 2:51 pm

RM, how would you compare PCLInux OS to Ubuntu 8.04? I'm a newbie but found it pretty easy to get everything in Ubuntu working except suspend/hibernate. Well, suspend works a little but hibernate freezes my system everytime. Also, some bluetooth issues I see with my phone and connecting to my T61.

Can anyone else comment on this?

rm · #36 Post by rm » Thu Sep 18, 2008 3:44 pm

muffd wrote:RM, how would you compare PCLInux OS to Ubuntu 8.04? I'm a newbie but found it pretty easy to get everything in Ubuntu working except suspend/hibernate. Well, suspend works a little but hibernate freezes my system everytime. Also, some bluetooth issues I see with my phone and connecting to my T61.

Can anyone else comment on this?

Well, as you can see on my review, PCLOS 2008 MiniMe is very easy to get working on a ThinkPad. The issue with Suspend is very much still a problem. That is a kernel problem that all distros suffer from and that Linus is well aware of and working hard to resolve. Hibernate, on the other hand, seems to work well (as I showed on my review). I don't have Bluetooth on my laptop, so I don't know how that would work.

No distro is perfect. But, of all the current options, PCLOS 2008 MiniMe is my favorite. There are strong rumors going around the PCLOS forums about an imminent new release. We'll have to see how that one does.

#37 Post by **archer6** » Thu Sep 18, 2008 4:14 pm

rm wrote:
muffd wrote:RM, how would you compare PCLInux OS to Ubuntu 8.04? I'm a newbie but found it pretty easy to get everything in Ubuntu working except suspend/hibernate. Well, suspend works a little but hibernate freezes my system everytime. Also, some bluetooth issues I see with my phone and connecting to my T61.

Can anyone else comment on this?
The issue with Suspend is very much still a problem. That is a kernel problem that all distros suffer from and that Linus is well aware of and working hard to resolve.

No distro is perfect.

Very well said.... I concur! While I'm somewhat new to the Linux OS, I have worked for 10 years in both the Mac environment and Windows environment on my laptops, at the end of the day, until recently non of those two had reliable suspend functionality. So much so that quite frankly I don't mess with it, even though I move around a lot during the day and it would be beneficial to a certain degree. My mindset it this: Ubuntu 8.04.1 which is my main OS, boots from cold to the desktop in just 23 seconds. I can live with that just fine, especially since it shuts down so fast, I haven't even bothered to time it. That in combination with everything else that Ubuntu does so well, I'm a very happy Linux user.

Cheers....

wswartzendruber · #38 Post by **wswartzendruber** » Thu Sep 18, 2008 6:27 pm

AKelley728 wrote:To all you more experienced Linux-heads out there, what would be the best Linux for a TP 600E with 128k (or is it 256k) of memory and a 10gb hard drive?

Slackware and Arch are supposed to be pretty lightweight. Then there's also Debian, which Ubuntu is based from.

#39 Post by **GomJabbar** » Thu Sep 18, 2008 6:52 pm

I got Suspend and Hibernate to work correctly on my T42 using Mandriva 2008.1. I admit it to some sleuthing and effort to get it all sorted.

For Suspend I use s2ram. I also found out that KPowerSave causes Suspend and Hibernation problems, so I uninstalled it and am using Klaptop instead.

For Hibernate I use the built in pm-hibernate. The trick with Hibernation was to get the swap file working properly.

Here are some links that got me sorted for using Hibernation.
http://en.opensuse.org/S2disk
http://sledge81.spaces.live.com/blog/cn ... !336.entry (this link will have to be pasted into your address bar)
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions ... le-573538/

I ran the command from console as root blkid to get the UUID info

Code: Select all

[root@localhost dkb]# blkid
/dev/hda5: UUID="e09d4e36-3921-11dd-9a00-0113e2bfe5f4" TYPE="ext3" SEC_TYPE="ext2"
/dev/hda6: TYPE="swap" LABEL="swap" UUID="b992a990-abb2-4115-aaa2-f478eb0ab81d"
/dev/hda1: UUID="1EA4E764A4E73D41" LABEL="IBM_PRELOAD" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/hda2: LABEL="IBM_SERVICE" UUID="460C-3761" TYPE="vfat"
/dev/hda7: UUID="488F-0C33" TYPE="vfat"

Next I edited my /etc/fstab file as root, example below.

Code: Select all

# Entry for /dev/hda5 :
UUID=e09d4e36-3921-11dd-9a00-0113e2bfe5f4 / ext3 noatime 1 1
# Entry for /dev/hda6 :
UUID=b992a990-abb2-4115-aaa2-f478eb0ab81d swap swap defaults 0 0
# Entry for /dev/hda1 :
UUID=1EA4E764A4E73D41 /disks/C ntfs-3g defaults 0 0
# Entry for /dev/hda7 :
UUID=488F-0C33 /disks/E vfat defaults 0 0
# Entry for /dev/hdc1 :
UUID=5410A43810A422CA /media/hd ntfs-3g defaults 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0

I added the following to the boot parameters in GRUB resume=/dev/hda6

I edited /etc/suspend.conf as root

Code: Select all

snapshot device = /dev/snapshot
resume device = /dev/hda6
#image size = 350000000
#suspend loglevel = 2
#compute checksum = y
compress = y
#encrypt = y
#early writeout = y
splash = y

Reboot for everything to take effect.

The Most User-friendly Distro for Thinkpad

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