In a quest to re-revive an old IBM Thinkpad, I sifted through many articles and forums surrounding the subject of operating systems. The piece you're reading now isn't intended to be a technical instructional as much as a high level overview of an approach that resulted in a fairly elegant, user friendly system on an outdated laptop computer powered by Linux.
If, like myself, you're only mildly acquainted with using a command line interpreter - or a black screen with a blinking cursor, your first order of business should be to ensure you have a primary web connected computer or tablet for referencing purposes. Many plug-and-play distributions do exist, but can be burdensome to older, memory deprived systems...
Here's a (very) rough breakdown of my Thinkpad's limitations:
...which is why I chose to 'build' the o/s from a base installation up.
Installing a base (sans graphics / desktop) Linux distribution is simple enough - configuring everything appropriately using a shell with just a prompt and blinking cursor awaiting cryptic commands can be quite daunting. After reading several online reviews and poking around forums, I drew the conclusion that the 'Slackware' distribution might best suit my needs. Using a freely available program called "Rufus" on my Windows 7 PC, I installed the downloaded .iso on a USB flash drive.
I was wrong about Slackware. With all due respect to its developers (who are most certainly echelons above my own abilities in the realm of compu-skillz), I was somewhat put-off by a cute sounding embedded system FYI that struck me as somewhat of a shout-out to insiders. In a way that's kind of cool, but I'm not an insider, and so I ultimately settled on Arch Linux.
Likely you've surmised that my Thinkpad is equipped with USB ports. It also has a built-in WiFi adapter and network interface. When you boot the Arch Linux .iso from external media, it 'pops' the kernel into RAM (I think) and requires an internet connection to install on your HDD.
Your first order of business should be to establish and confirm web connectivity. Since I used a WiFi connection, this was simple enough with the USB booted system, but reactivating the adapter presented some challenges AFTER the installation.
Next you'll want to partition your hard disk drive(s). I just followed a schema I found on line that basically devotes 100 MB to the /boot partition, 1 GB for a 'swap' partition, 20 GB for the root system, and the remainder to the /home division.
I would recommend you take a fair bit of time to become accustomed to entering rudimentary commands.
If, like myself, you're only mildly acquainted with using a command line interpreter - or a black screen with a blinking cursor, your first order of business should be to ensure you have a primary web connected computer or tablet for referencing purposes. Many plug-and-play distributions do exist, but can be burdensome to older, memory deprived systems...
Here's a (very) rough breakdown of my Thinkpad's limitations:
- Intel Celeron M Processor (1.16 GHz)
- 40 GB HDD
- 256 MB RAM
...which is why I chose to 'build' the o/s from a base installation up.
Installing a base (sans graphics / desktop) Linux distribution is simple enough - configuring everything appropriately using a shell with just a prompt and blinking cursor awaiting cryptic commands can be quite daunting. After reading several online reviews and poking around forums, I drew the conclusion that the 'Slackware' distribution might best suit my needs. Using a freely available program called "Rufus" on my Windows 7 PC, I installed the downloaded .iso on a USB flash drive.
I was wrong about Slackware. With all due respect to its developers (who are most certainly echelons above my own abilities in the realm of compu-skillz), I was somewhat put-off by a cute sounding embedded system FYI that struck me as somewhat of a shout-out to insiders. In a way that's kind of cool, but I'm not an insider, and so I ultimately settled on Arch Linux.
Likely you've surmised that my Thinkpad is equipped with USB ports. It also has a built-in WiFi adapter and network interface. When you boot the Arch Linux .iso from external media, it 'pops' the kernel into RAM (I think) and requires an internet connection to install on your HDD.
Your first order of business should be to establish and confirm web connectivity. Since I used a WiFi connection, this was simple enough with the USB booted system, but reactivating the adapter presented some challenges AFTER the installation.
Next you'll want to partition your hard disk drive(s). I just followed a schema I found on line that basically devotes 100 MB to the /boot partition, 1 GB for a 'swap' partition, 20 GB for the root system, and the remainder to the /home division.
I would recommend you take a fair bit of time to become accustomed to entering rudimentary commands.
