Well done to Barry and all developers - ThinkPad 600E user

Booting, installing, newbie
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The Major
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Joined: Thu 10 Nov 2005, 06:58
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Well done to Barry and all developers - ThinkPad 600E user

#1 Post by The Major »

During the course of the last few months I've tried various Linux distributions, and differnet versions of Puppy.

I am very impressed, and through this forum I have learned how to make an old ThinkPad (366Mhz CPU, 288MB memory) fully working with Linux, and moreover, connect with other PCs and share files.

I've read that people have had problems with sound, wifi cards, networking, etc. My advice is to everyone is - just stick with it and seek help. If anyone has problems with any of the following, have confidence that they can be solved (on a ThinkPad 600E at least)

1. Sound - disable QuickBoot in the ThinkPad boot settings (hold down F1 while you start the laptop), and run the ALSA wizard, choosing the legacy ISA option. Then run alsamixer to check the sound levels (I unmuted everything except the microphone settings - the letter m turns on / off mute, and left / right arrow moves you across the sliders.

2. Belkin F5D7010 wireless card - copy driver files from the Belkin CD to the home folder and run the Wireless Network wizard, choosing the driver file bcmw15.inf. Just follow the instructions in ndiswrapper. Then run the ethernet wizard.

3. Wine - I found that Frank's Corner website was very useful. Out of interest Office 97 (not Access or Outlook), Fireworks MX and Flash MX work OK. Having proved that, I'm not sure I'll use them except Fireworks.

4. PupBeGone is useful to remove applications I don't use.

5. I installed it on a hard drive partition on a Windows 98SE machine, and you can mount /dev/hda1 as a drive to access files (and some programmes using wine) on that system. I use Windows 98 only to access old Outlook files (huge, and I'm too lazy to convert) and an old Paperport sheet feed scanner.

The net result is a fully working system that is on a par (functionally) with Windows, and is much more fun to use. I've also learnt a little about Linux, and I appreciate all the hard work that others have done.

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