[ltp] Preferred distro for Thinkpads?

[Tom Adelstein]

On Sun, 2005-08-14 at 16:46 +0200, Jaime Iniesta wrote:
> Hi, I'm currently a Fedora Core 4 user on my PC. I'm thinking about
> trying a different distro on my new Thinkpad R52.
> 
> I would like to know what distros are you using, and if there is a
> "best distro" for Thinkpads. I'm thinking about installing Debian
> Sarge, maybe Ubuntu.

Hi,

I doubt you will find a consensus on Linux distributions for laptops and
especially Thinkpads. IBM/Lenovo targeted in the hardware for the R
series to Microsoft XP. 

Depending on your memory and processor, you will have to do some
engineering to get Linux to work with your Thinkpad as well as it does
with XP. Linux will run better on the Thinkpad, but it won't have all
the features of XP. That's unfortunate, because XP requires significant
maintenance to operate optimally. Personally, it's a PIA to run XP but
it you wind up in a foreign 5 star hotel in a foreign country with
Internet access you might discover the hotel using Dynamic DNS and
Active Directory and you won't be able to long on wirelessly. So, XP
would be handy if you need to work.

The lower the resources on your Thinkpad the better you will be with
Debian distributions such as Ubuntu. But you have to make a lot of
modifications. Still, it runs snappy on low resource R series.

If you have enough RAM and processor power, then you can use SUSE or the
Novell Linux Desktop. You can also use Fedora Core4 and kill many
unnecessary processes.

Experienced Linux people will find Gentoo a good choice again if you
have the resources.

I dual boot mine since I travel and wind up in some places where just
getting on-line is a blessing.

We'll get their in the near future, but for now, you might want to keep
a partition for each.

I've published some articles on the subject of optimizing Linux and then
on optimizing the Thinkpad.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8308
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8317
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8462
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8322

You might find them useful in getting the most out of your Linux
distribution. The focus primarily on Ubuntu and Fedora.