Thus spake Mike Manchester on the 24 day of the 09 month in the year 2002:
> Maybe Debian just don't like Thinkpads in general.
I wouldn't say that. Except for the strange winmodem in my 570E, I've
had very little trouble using Debian. With woody, it should be even
easier. No special tweaks were necessary to get PCMCIA support working.
I simply plugged in my older network card and It Just Worked(TM).
When I initially installed, the only thing that was a pain in the butt
to get functioning was the sound support. I just upgraded my 570E to
woody last weekend, and haven't gotten around to upgrading to a 2.4
kernel, but with ALSA support integrated into the kernel these days, it
should be considerably easier.
A word of warning to newbies. Installing Debian isn't necessarily easy.
Installing Linux on notebooks isn't necessarily easy either. Installing
Debian on laptops can be difficult. By default Debian doesn't ship with
apm support in it's kernel. You'll have to recompile your kernel for
that, and possibly to get support for your sound card (assuming the
kernel supports it in the first place). The Debian installation manual
explains how to make kernels "The Debian Way" here:
http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch-post-install.en.html#s-kernel-baking
Another point for the impatient: Debian probably isn't going to have the
latest bleeding edge software. Should you really want the latest
version of gtk-gnutella, or what have you, you're probably not going to
find it. Personally, I tend to use X windows for Eterms, xmms, gaim,
gnucash, spreadsheets, and web browsing. LaTeX is my word-processor
replacement. Debian works for me. If you demand bleeding-edge WIMP
interfaces, Debian probably isn't for you. If it's okay that the GUI
tools are 6 months or more out of date at times, you don't mind a
potentially nasty setup process, like the idea of apt-get and like
upgrading between major versions without re-installs, then perhaps
Debian is for you. (Personally, I tend to compile gtk-gnutella from source
in order to get the latest bleeding edge features. ;-)
I'm don't know where you're physically located Jeff, but lately I've been
attending the Sarasota meetings. If you bring your laptop there and
remind me to bring some boot floppies beforehand, I'll be happy to take a
stab at it.
As for FreeBSD, a friend of mine managed to get it to sleep (the only
feature he actually cared about) on some sort of ThinkPad. Apparently,
FreeBSD's laptop support is improving. I think they've even ported the
ALSA drivers. My problem with FreeBSD on laptops is that their hard
drives are small. I don't want a source tree competing with my mp3
collection! ;-)
>
> On Mon, 2002-09-23 at 20:25, jeff wrote:
> > I was wondering if anyone here has been able to install Debian on a
> > TP600. I have had RH, Mandrake, SuSE, and Slack installed at various
> > times, but have had no luck with Debian. I have been interested in
> > trying Debian for a while, but I haven't found any info about installing
> > on a TP600. So far I have not successfully completed a bootup with
> > Debian on the 600.
> > Is there some trick to installing Debian that I am overlooking, or
> > does it not work well with the TP600? Also, I am thinking about FreeBSD.
> > Anyone have experience/opinions about that on a 600?
> >
> > Thanks for whatever info you can provide,
> > Jeff
>
-- Matthew MoenOutlook is as attractive to email viruses as a heap of dead and rotting cows is to a fly. So long as that maggot-filled pile of corpses is there, swatting at the flies isn't going to work. Alan Bellingham, SDM
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