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by keithpeter 3466 days ago
OA uses a Thinkpad X40 as the target machine. A 1.8 inch Hitachi drive with PATA interface and with 256 or 512Mb of RAM soldered to board with a socket for one further RAM stick. This is a 12 year old design. Probably best used with what it has rather than spending any money upgrading. A good test target for a 'light' OS.

A Thinkpad X60 or later (dual core) with 2Gb RAM can run a 'full fat' Linux (e.g. Ubuntu or CentOS/Fedora) OK if not slick in my experience (and yes I did once compile a kernel from source on an X61s - took a few hours). An SSD makes a difference in that kind of machine.
2 comments
IgorPartola 3466 days ago
Your comment about the kenrel taking a few hours to compile made me chuckle. I went through a Gentoo phase. Nothing like compiling your compiler to compile your compiler to compile your system. Took days.

And before that I had a machine with 24 MB RAM and a terrible habit of recompiling the kernel or running BSD with ports.

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digler999 3466 days ago
> Took days.

at least yours finished. Mine would run just long enough to waste most of my day, only to error out because one lib wanted python-3.2.785.2.r58 but could only find python-3.2.1435.214.r3

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khedoros1 3466 days ago
I was using Slackware around the time that distros were switching from xfree86 to x.org. Not knowing any better, I was trying to run it as a bleeding edge system. I think I took a week or two manually upgrading each library one at a time to make the jump to the new X server.

Apparently I didn't learn my lesson; the next distro I used was Gentoo.

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AstroJetson 3466 days ago
X60 and X61 owner here. SSD drive brought new life to the machines. The new pixel desktop makes them fun linux boxes.
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keithpeter 3466 days ago
Excellent!

An SSD and stock Gnome 3 Debian in my X61s (2Gb RAM) with its Atheros wifi card goes very well, so I'm hardly surprised that your machines work well with a less demanding desktop environment and it is good that you find them of use.

Care to share the output of pstree -l -A from a fresh session? That would tell us what processes are running by default (cups&c).

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