Do i need a special distro for my Laptop?

GloVe · 09-27-2003, 03:25 AM

hey, i recieved a second-hand laptop (kinda old - IBM ThinkPad 600E) and it has a Windows98 and XP on it (yuck!).
do i need to install a special linux distribution for it? or all of the distributions will work?
and what's the laptop's architecture?
thanks.

micxz · 09-27-2003, 03:43 AM

SuSE all the way;

GloVe · 09-27-2003, 03:59 AM

but you know that SuSE works on this machine (IBM ThinkPad 600E) ?
i have at the moment SuSE 8.2 on my PC machine and very setisfied from it.
but i think i want something different on the Lap.
Maybe Debian? --- http://condor.depaul.edu/~jkristof/debian-tp600e.html
thanks.

megaspaz · 09-27-2003, 04:07 AM

check this link out.

http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/ibm.html

there's like 5 (6?) entries of that model listed here. the first link is a debian 3 install, but i don't see why any version greater than 3 would be any different.

http://condor.depaul.edu/~jkristof/debian-tp600e.html

also from the first link, it would seem like mandrake could be installed on that model. the rest of the links seem to be redhat 7.3 installs.

GloVe · 09-27-2003, 04:13 AM

ok i think i will go on Debian... 10x all...

Greyweather · 09-27-2003, 10:18 AM

"and what's the laptop's architecture?"

The PII is i686, which means you could probably install any ix86 Linux distro on it.

The main thing is you'll want to use a GUI other than KDE or GNOME if you want decent performance.

And SuSE apparently does ok on older hardware.
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/4795/1/