[ltp] installing linux on IBM tp 600

[Richard Neill]

Dear Nils,

I'd personally recommend Mandrake (as being easy to use), and KDE 
(again, easier to use). Although lots of people may differ on this!
Knoppix is also wonderful (be warned that it will run a bit slowly 
though, as reading from CDROM is much slower than from Hard Disk).
In general, I can give you this advice:

1)Use the most recent Linux. Don't be tempted to install something 
ancient - they may be smaller, but are also less functional. It's better 
to take a modern distro, and only install exactly the packages you want.

2)You will find the tp4d daemon useful. It allows you to get maximum 
sensitivity out of the trackpoint - otherwise, it can be a bit slow.
http://www-hft.ee.tu-berlin.de/~strauman/tp4utils

3)When you partition the drive, think carefully. Normally, the minimum 
is /, swap, /home.  But for a very small drive, you might consider 
having only the one root partition (and swap) - that way it's easier to 
change the balance between programs and your data. Although you can get 
better power management out of Ext2 (by using noflushd), ReiserFS is 
more reliable - and won't need to fsck.

4)If you want it, it's certainly possible to get hibernate (i.e. 
suspend-to-disk) working. But you'll need another partition for it - I 
personally don't think it's really worthwhile. (You can still have 
suspend-to-RAM anyway).

Best wishes and good luck.

Richard

P.S. There's a lot of useful help on the web. Did you know about 
www.google.com/linux ?



Nils Houben wrote:
> Hi there,
> I am totally new in the linux-world. This year i start getting 
> linux-lessons in my school - so i want to have my own linux to test the 
> things we do in school.
> 
> My Thinkpad 600 has 500 Mghz and about 150 MB RAM, the question now is 
> which linux to install, and where to get it!
> As i said I am totally new to the linux world, but i am very curious and 
> optimistic about linux. Though i need an easy to install linux and it 
> should be relativly small (the hdd has 4GB).
> I would be very thankful for any help in this case....
> best regards
>    Nils Houben
> 
> P.S.: as you may have noticed my english is very poor, so please dare 
> with it or write in german.
> 

-- 
rn214@hermes.cam.ac.uk  **  http://www.richardneill.org
Richard Neill, Trinity College, Cambridge, CB21TQ, U.K.