[ILUG] Re: Best Distro for P2 Thinkpad 390E ?

[Francis Daly]

On 14/05/06, PJ Wall <PJ.Wall at itcarlow.ie> wrote:

Hi there,

> I have just got my hands on a P2 ThinkPad 390E.
>
> Anyone have any ideas about the most suitable distro for this make / model /
> spec machine ?

If you want to learn about distributions, then try them all in turn.

Otherwise, the most suitable distro is "whichever one you already
know". Failing that, "whichever one your friends know and can help you
with".

And failing that, just use debian ;-)

"this make / model / spec", by the way, is incomplete. What size disk,
how much memory, and other factors, are variable within the 390E
range.

I have a 600E, which is probably not too far away from yours in terms
of memory and processor speed, but is probably quite far in terms of
sound and modem hardware.

A "C:" partition of "ramsize plus a bit" will be useful for "suspend
to disk" and to allow you run the dos config utility without needing
to floppy-boot.

A swap partition instead of a swap file will be useful if you want to
try any of the live cd distributions like dsl or puppy or many others.

And whichever distro you use, you'll likely want the tpctl package and
the thinkpad modules.

But once a kernel recognises the hardware, any distro with the same
kernel should Just Work.

> I'm not too fussed... just looking for ideas, and please no
> Gnome V KDE debates !!!

On my 600E, I use debian stable. More or less. (Which happened to be
"whichever one I already knew" when I was installing, and I haven't
felt the need to reinstall.) Some extra modules for the hardware, and
some extra applications for choice.

And I don't normally use Gnome on it. And I don't normally use KDE on it.

Good luck,

	f