IBM TP770ED
From DSL Wiki
Installing DSL on an IBM ThinkPad 770 ED
Contents |
Machine specs
IBM ThinkPad 770ED (circa 1998)
- Processor: 344Mhz(+/-??)
- RAM: 64mb (true!)
- HD: 3.8gb, partitioned with 100mb for DSL
- Swap partition - none
Installing
This is achieved as follows:
- Partition the drive using gparted / qparted etc.
- Boot from cd
- Once booted into DSL just do a standard hd install
- Set up the boot-loader
- Bob's your uncle!
I am amazed at how fast this machine is - Win2k was working extremely slowly so I tried DSL and the laptop just took off. Boot-time was cut from around 4 minutes to just over one minute.
The 770 belongs to my dad who uses it for writing. Windoze finally cracked up giving us the BSOD one too many times so I decided to move on. Good idea!
USB flash-disks
I tried other mini-Linux flavours on this machine but settled for DSL because it's easy to work with and sports the 2.4 kernel. The 2.6 kernel has given me endless problems with hardware configurations on other machines but I had no problems with the flash-disk, it mounts and unmounts in 'emelfm' smoothly (su for umount, of course).
Modem setup
The internal modem on the laptop was u/s so I plugged a 36k PCMCIA modem into the slot (PCMCIA auto-configured with no problems or help from me).
Setup was achieved by opening the DSL panel, clicking on the 'Dialup' button and configuring the connection following the prompts. Clicking the 'Dial' button got me connected immediately.
Sound setup
This is a bit of an issue. The 770 uses MWave and I am looking for an easy way to set this up on Linux. Have found some sites dedicated to this (the 770 is still a popular machine).
More info will follow as time dictates.
