[ILUG] Best Distro for P2 Thinkpad 390E ?

[Declan Moriarty]

> > 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 ?  I'm not too fussed... just looking for ideas, and please
> > no Gnome V KDE debates !!!
> 
> How big is the disk?
> How much RAM?
> 
> I think any distribution will work fine if you have enough of both.

The following is a quote from  the IBM/Thinkpad 390 link on linux-
laptop.net

http://www.patrickrea.org/modules.php?
op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=8&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

My IBM 390E is a great little machine. PII-300, 192MB of RAM, 4.5GB hard
drive. Great display, reasonable graphics card and one of the best
laptop keyboards ever made.

Provided you're not heavy into multimedia, might I suggest the ultimate
lightweight distro, LFS? This runs very well on yesterday's hardware.
You can compile automagically using libxml2, nalfs, and the profile.
That gives you a 'bare bones system.

After that, you install what you want from BLFS. I would suggest no
gnome, no kde, keep it light and as daemon free as possible. Performance
will be +20% on any distro I have tried, purely because the scripts are
minimal, and there's fewer things cluttering ram. For what bloatware you
do use (firefox, thunderbird, OO) get the binaries. X you can compile.

Where this approach is a royal PITA is when you want evolution, gnucash,
gnuplot, or one or two other programs which require a plethora of
dependencies, or with gnome where there's zillions of packages and
everything requires something else. Mind you, you can install rpm. 

BTW the guy is running Mandrake 10 on his.

Watch yourself on the acpi or apm in the kernel. Those things have
kernel options installed for them as suspend is _weird_.