Need an OS for an old thinkpad

[Mutant Corn]

It's not the burn speed...older versions worked. One of the devs thinks it's machine specific.

Well...I'm out of ideas. Any chance Xubuntu would work? I've had it running on a pentium 1 before, but there was a bit more RAM installed...

 

[root]

To be honest, I'd look for an OS of the era of the machine.

perhaps an older version of Linux, or even windows 98.

Don't expect miracles from old machines, they just aren't really going to run OS's that were released years after the machine was released.

Of course the trouble with running an Old OS, (either MS or Linux) is that you're opening yourself to having old security bugs, this won't be 'as much' of a problem using Linux I think but it is something to consider.

 

[Mutant Corn]

Aren't the smaller linux distros like puppy and DSL based on old linux kernels?

And yeah I know it's not going to be lghtning quick or anything, I just want it to work, and not take up the whole freaking hard drive like XP did. I don't want to downgrade to Windows 9x for security reasons, but as you can see finding a linux distro that works had been a bit of a challenge...the system meets Xubuntu's system requirements(I finally found them), so I'm going to give that a try.

 

[wmorri]

Hi,

Yes and no. DSL runs on the 2.4.x kernel, but that is just because they don't want to deal with increasing the size of their OS. You can read more about that here.
Puppy on the other hand isn't as small as DSL, and it uses the 2.6.x kernel. For more info see puupy release notes. I guess that it is all a matter of whether you want the most current of everything or not.

Cheers!