[plug] IBM Thinkpad 760XD

[Tomasz Grzegurzko]

Quoting "Bruce M. Axtens" <bruce_axtens at yahoo.com.au>:

> Thanks to Tomasz at the iVec demo I was able to speed
> this little monster up by fiddling with hdparm.
> 
> I installed Ubuntu. Is there a better distro for such
> a resource-strapped laptop?
> 
> Also, does anyone have a working PCMCIA card they can
> lend/give/sell me (in that order) as the one that came
> with the machine appears to be cactus. Interestingly,
> Ubuntu recognises it's there and cardctl (or one of
> those card* thingies) even identifies the card aright,
> but ethtool can't talk to it and the lights don't
> flash when I'm connected to the network.
> 
> Also, how do I tell Ubuntu that I really don't want
> the scsi/usb/tsdev modules loaded. Sure I can rmmod or
> (is it?) modprobe -r but that seems only to last up
> until the next reboot.
> 
> Thanks in advance for all help and suggestions.
> 
> Regards,
> Bruce.
> 

I would look at (if not going fully debian) running the 2.4-tsc kernel from
Debian (or better yet if you're brave compile your own 2.6 kernel set to
pentium-mmx, which would also solve your module problems if you did because you
can omit the stuff you don't want). Also look at installing XFCE4 as a
lightweight desktop interface replacement. www.delilinux.de is a very light
distribution for (very) old machines; that may be a little extreme in your case
a debian stable install will probably do the trick for that thing nicely (MMX is
quite a help in some ways after all). 

http://www.thinkwiki.org is a really good site for all you thinkpad owners.

Another distro which will probably give the best performance but require a lot
of work and patience is Gentoo...

Regards,
Tomasz