Ask HN: I need a new OS for my Thinkpad T40. Can you help? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I need a new OS for my Thinkpad T40. Can you help?

5 pointsdaveambrose10 comments

Before jumping over to a PowerBook in 2005, I used an IBM Thinkpad T40 (http://bit.ly/OFdkd) during my first two years in school. I put the laptop in storage (in my closet) and decided to gut everything on it, including Windows XP.

I'm trying to decide between installing Ubuntu (which I've done before but feel I don't need all its features) and something stripped down like Good OS.

The laptop won't be my main workhorse like PowerBook as I'll just use it to connect to the Web, Gmail, Google Docs/Calendar and Dropbox.

What are your recommendations for lightweight, netbook-oriented OSes?

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You could run Ubuntu's netbook edition (Remix) or do an install of Arch Linux and only install what you need if you think Ubuntu carries too much.

You could also give xPud a shot, it boots in a ridiculously 5-10 seconds: http://www.xpud.org/

Try Linux Mint. It is based on Ubuntu and adds many of the inconveniently uninstalled apps (Java, Flash, etc.) For most people it just works perfectly right after the install. On my X41 Tablet my boot times are in half the time of XP and I have no issues. Add Wine to run those pesky Windows apps you cannot live without and you are set. And, of course, it is free. There are many wonderful Linux releases out there. If you have the time, try as many as you can to see what works for you.

openbsd

yesterday, i needed to install new os to my amd64 box. alas, my bro borrowed my dvd rom and i didn't feel like installing from floppies (mine are all dusty)

i have 256mb flash disk lying around, then i googled how to boot openbsd from flash

it turned out that the flash disk must be skipped by 32 sectors, have partition sd0a for boot and sd0i for MSDOS (so ubuntu and osx can mount it as normal flash disk)

after that, the pc booted successfuly from flash disk. untar all tgz from sd0i

the whole openbsd45 fits in 256 mb flash disk :d now i don't need to burn blank dvdrw everytime there's new release

it's quite educational for me since i've been spoiled by always installing openbsd solely from cd (easiest) or floppy+ftp (trickier, for older system like thinkpad x360d no less)

it's lightweight, with dwm. firefox3 with dozens of tabs+addons, vncviewer, xterms, inkscape open take like 200+mb.

my 1GB ram is not exhausted yet, my 2GB swap isn't even used at all. similar setup would exhaust my ubuntu (i migrate back from ubuntu to openbsd and osx)

How about Xubuntu? Personally, I prefer Xfce to Gnome or KDE (though that's very much a matter of taste), and it's lightweight enough that I've had it running on P2s with 64MB of RAM.

There's also Gentoo, which I've had running on just about everything (Sparcs and MIPS included), but it takes some dedication.

Try gOS or the currently in alpha jolicloud. If you want a nice browsing and media playing experience go for Linux Mint. It has all codecs installed out of the box (including flash, divx etc.).

IMO good os is a terrible version of Ubuntu, its better to just install ubuntu remix as it is.

how about finding a copy of OSX leopard and install it on the T40 to make it a hackintosh?

Even with the Pentium M in the Thinkpad, can I run Netbook Remix? Their documentation states an Atom processor.

You can install the netbook packages over a standard 32-bit ubuntu installation. There are a couple of pages on the wiki for how to do that.

If you really want to stretch your brain install one of the BSD's and use that as your desktop for a while.

If you load up FreeBSD or OpenBSD and work through the documentation and stick with it for a couple of months you will be a better system administrator and a better developer because you will have been exposed to some of the different ways of solving the problems of building an effective operating system.

openbsd tends to do its own way tho, so it's kinda hard to google for common unix problems (its faq+man pages are more reliable because they are more specific)

i started freebsd (5.3 iirc) like 5+ years ago and abandoned it for openbsd 3.6. do i miss anything?

My T30 runs OpenBSD really well. It feels a lot more lightweight than most Linux distros I've tried, even with KDE & Firefox & what-have-you.

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