

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

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>What are your recommendations for lightweight, netbook-oriented OSes?
======
mdweezer
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/>

------
FrankBlack
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.

------
hs
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)

------
jballanc
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.

------
chaosprophet
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.).

------
ktharavaad
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?

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

~~~
olefoo
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.

~~~
hs
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?

------
mbeihoffer
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.

