I acquired an old IBM Thinkpad with a 500 mhz Celeron and 128 Mb of RAM. It has no HDD. I installed a 4GB CF card in the HDD slot. I tried to run a live USB on it with Linux Mint but it wouldn't run. I suspect this may be because of the small amount of RAM. I searched this site and learned that Antix will run on older laptops with modest HDD and RAM. Would this be a good choice for this laptop? Thank you for any advice you could provide.

it will be tight but it should work as long as you give the system some swap space. I've got a sony laptop of similar vintage, but it has 512 mb of ram and a 15 gb harddrive. antix works just fine on it.

drg has some good posts in the forum for booting from super low-resource macihnes.

you want to be sure the machine is actually capable of booting from usb. Not all of the machines of that vintage can. My sony can't, for instance, so I'm left with either booting from CD, which is painfully slow, or using a seperate boot loader to boot the usb. I use plop bootmager for this. They have floppy and cd images as well. (yes, my sony still has a working floppy!).

I think Antix 'base' should work OK.

(Or you might like to try SliTaz very light use of & runs from ram
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://www.slitaz.org/en/get/#stable"
linktext was:"http://www.slitaz.org/en/get/#stable"
====================================
- don't be fooled by the seemingly small size.)

I've used IBM Thinkpad T42 and T60 models in the past, and both have booted Linux distributions live, including antiX, very well. In fact, MEPIS and antiX were among the best because the firmware included would generally allow me to do things like take a laptop to the laundromat with me and run it live with the free Wifi that's often provided.

As said above. With a /swap partition. Dillo browser. You learning as you go along.
AntiX will run just fine on that thinkpad.

I own T23, A22M, and run 13.2 just fine and dandy. Make a /swap partition first before running the installer though.
512MB should be plenty. You don't want the gui installer to crash/lockup because of lack of memory. /swap partition will take over the heavy lifting after the ram stick maxes out.

Antixfan wrote:I acquired an old IBM Thinkpad with a 500 mhz Celeron and 128 Mb of RAM. It has no HDD. I installed a 4GB CF card in the HDD slot. I tried to run a live USB on it with Linux Mint but it wouldn't run. I suspect this may be because of the small amount of RAM. I searched this site and learned that Antix will run on older laptops with modest HDD and RAM. Would this be a good choice for this laptop? Thank you for any advice you could provide.

Let us know what model number the Thinkpad is, and I think we can figure it out on getting AntiX to work for you. I suspect that antiX 13.1 BASE will be about the most up to date version you get to work without problems.

Your choices with these"low powered" systems is limited. Most of the OS have updated for the newer computer systems, and are dropping support for the older ones little by little. Look at the specs below on my JUNKBOX system. DSL (Damn Small Linux), Puppy, Crunchbag#! (modified), MEPIS, and AntiX are the onlly distros I could get to boot and load on mine. Some of the others (like Mint) loaded on live cd, but started acting weird when I tried to load it on my HDD (like the cd player would work then not, wireless would work then not, cpu lockups). As long as it is Debian based, you can get the drivers for your components.

Antixfan wrote:I acquired an old IBM Thinkpad with a 500 mhz Celeron and 128 Mb of RAM. It has no HDD. I installed a 4GB CF card in the HDD slot. I tried to run a live USB on it with Linux Mint but it wouldn't run. I suspect this may be because of the small amount of RAM. I searched this site and learned that Antix will run on older laptops with modest HDD and RAM. Would this be a good choice for this laptop? Thank you for any advice you could provide.

I spent 3 days downloading and trying to install every lite version of linux i could get my hands on. I am here to tell you that out of the 15 or so distros that I tried the only one that even booted to live cd and installed is AntiX...
I have an older machine then yours, mine is a toshiba portege 3110ct which is a pentium 2 300mhz mini laptop with 128 megs ram and a 6 gig hard drive... Now that I have registered on this forum I have 4 questions I am going to ask to hopefully fix the issues I am having, wish me luck...

Thanks to everyone for your responses. My Thinkpad is an I series 1200-1161. I have since changed the CF card to one of 16 GB and increased the RAM from 128 MB to 512 MB. I first created a live CD with Antix 13.5 and ran it on my desktop, (Dell GX-260, 2.26 GHZ CPU, 120 GB RAM), and it worked fine. I then put the CD in the laptop and it appeared to start OK. The Antix screen was displayed and I clicked on the “antiX-13.5 386-jwm (7 December 2013)” selection. After about 2 minutes I received the message:

Welcome to Antix-13.5 Killah P!

After much text was written on the screen I received the following messages:

Mount failed for selinuxfs on /sys/fs/selinux: No such file or directory
xauth: file /home/demo/.Xauthority does not exist

More text was written to the screen and then the main Antix screen reappeared. If I selected the first option on the screen the above cycle repeats.

From the Antix screen I could make any of the F1 to F6 selections and get help, etc. I just can't get anything else to happen. There must be something subtle I'm just not seeing here.

13.5 isn't even beta yet. 13.2 is the latest public release. You may want to try that.

I tried Antix 13.2 32 bit with a live CD on the laptop but still couldn't get it to work. I have also tried other distros, PCLinuxOS and Linux Puppy but they wouldn't work either. All of these work fine on my desktop though.

Do you know what vintage that celeron is? (Pentium, P2, PIII, or P4?)

Model number of the thinkpad might help too. I'm not optimistic if neither antix nor puppy would work. those are usually my go-tos on old stuff.

I tried experimenting with the boot options, (acpi, antix=MLXD, copy to ram, etc.), but none had any effect. The last line on the screen is the following:

[....] Waiting for /dev to be fully populated...

After this, nothing happens. I hate to have to go back to Windows 98 but it's the only thing that runs on this laptop and I'm just about out of things to try.

try this as a boot option, at this point what can it hurt.
A really old kernel from Debian woody era, would most likely work.

Is that the 13.5 alpha1, or alpha2?
I believe the alpha1 should work from a cd, but alpha2 was made to fix something that kept it from booting from usb?

If I remember right, alpha1 got as far as you say yours do...

Eino wrote:try this as a boot option, at this point what can it hurt.

Code: Select all

vga=771 noapic nolapic acpi=force irqpoll

A really old kernel from Debian woody era, would most likely work.

I gave it a try but the only difference I saw was that the screen text was smaller. I think I need more knowledge on these commands. Do you know where could I find some documentation on boot codes that I might try?