Nice! What OS are you running?

Ah yes, Linux, the thing that would make my old laptops usable if only I could figure out how anything works on it

Linux Mint.... there are leaner ones that I could use, but I use it rarely enough not to care about a slow boot up.

Mint is one of the more user friendly versions

Did you switch it to linux right when you bought it or much later on ? I do have pretty much the same situation with an old thinkpad on mint who does the job

I bought it for 30 eur a year or so ago because of nostalgia. It came with Windows XP on it and I popped linux on because I just wanted it to do the occasional bit of stuff unconnected to the internet. The pic was taken when I was updating things over ethernet.

"William E. Shotts, Jr. - The Linux command line: a complete introduction" - changed my life.

Oh I've tried it, I recognized it immediately. Still end up bashing my head against a wall trying to solve some minor issue that pops up.

I can relate, did the same with my Toshiba NB305 Atom notebook running bodhi, and an old HP G7 1317c running Lubuntu.

The HP dual boots Windows 10 if I have to, but mostly I run Lubuntu.

Linux brought them both back from the dead.

Two years in and I've come to accept show-stopping bugs as just another unavoidable fact of life.

I love me some IBM Thinkpads!! Those things were built like tanks!

mint xfce is relatively lightweight and comes with essentially all of the features of mint plus insane customizability from the fact that the xfce de is like 20 years old and has really great documentation.

Why don’t you try ChromeOS Flex? Linux-based so it’s lightweight but with an easy to use interface.

I’m just realizing my laptop that’s 11 years of works entirely fine.

ChromeOS Flex doesn't support 32 bit, not sure of the architecture on this model but that's been my issue with older laptops

Gotta love those classic keyboards and not the chiclet keys nowadays

Well, by doing nothing I guess you gave it your best shot :p

I have a Thinkpad 600E from 1999 that still connects to the internet.

Yes, it's running linux. Since I love old tech, I still find it quite useful without a lot of clutter. I've learned how to use a lot of debugging tools with it.

I'm pretty surprised it had a 1 Gbit ethernet connect at that time, a quick google search tells me most hard-drives capped out at about 50MB/s or 400Mb/s in 2005 and those were likely for the Desktops.

Don't worry, after two years of headbanging and multiple system reinstall, you will somehow understand how to use it

It's not 17 years ago this photo was taken. His laptop is 17 years old.

Did the same thing with a refurbished Dell. Cost me $100 with a guarantee it'll work or my money back from a major retailer, put Ubuntu on it once I was sure it booted and was able to connect to the internet, hold a charge, etc. I've never been happier with a laptop.

the bandwidth of your NIC hasn’t nothing to do with the write speed of your hard drive.

I've installed half a dozen different distributions, and spent multiple afternoons on forums trying to find the solutions to the problems I've had.

Now open some modern web page :)

My coworker tried to get me to switch to Linux. He showed me his setup and I was like, nah, hard pass. Not trying to get a degree in computing just to avoid using windows.

My coworker tried to get me to switch to Linux. He showed me his setup and I was like, nah, hard pass. Not trying to get a degree in computing just to avoid using windows.

he’s probably thinking of the bandwidth of the physical NIC on the laptop vs the bandwidth of the internet connection and he’d be right to wonder about that.

idk how it was for things like laptops, but it wouldn’t be that uncommon to see a 100mb bandwidth NIC on an enterprise switch, although 1gb was certainly common as well.

I have win98 on one of my IBM A20M's that i should try this on.

I love the trackpoint enough that i still daily my 02R0400 IBM keyboard.

Well yea, but you're not going to have much use of it a 1Gb connection if there isn't much you can do with it

…..you streaming content and loading web-pages has nothing to do with your HARD DRIVE write speed 😂.

.....

Thanks for the tip. I thought 35 bucks is a lot, but ok. Then I googled for the pdf… just because. And it’s CC licensed. You can download it here:

https://linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php

ggwp for sharing the link

I'm still flogging an Acer Aspire One, running Mint. Its slow but the form factor is really nice.

Lenovo has kept a lot of the design in their current T series.

There wasn't that much streaming going on in 2005, and you were limited by internet speeds, which in 2005 was roughly 1-2 Mb/s.

So the main place to use a 1Gb/s connection would be a local network

I have one that bought 15 years ago and still works. The only problem is that heats up very quick. But gets fixed putting a bottle of water over it. Don't use it very frequently but is still alive. And with Linux, the laptop saver.

>800+Mbit/s

More than enough for any task.

That keyboard is amazing. Probably one of the best laptop keyboards ever as far as travel and tactile feel (IMO).

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Remind me 20 years!

Ohhhh Mint on a ThinkPad... that's the good stuff right there. I rocked that for quite a while.

Ever considered an upgrade? Not sure if it’s available for this model, but there are some upgrade kits for older ThinkPads. I’m talking motherboards with newer processors and such.

Lubuntu and xbuntu are my fav. Light weight distro.

Puppy Linux or something is very light weight at 128 mb.

How are you pretending to be tech inclined? You aren't getting the inclination that he is referring to the fact if you download at 1Gbps and your laptops HD only writes at 400Mbps then it's a waste to have a 1Gbps NIC? And where were you working that a 1Gb NIC was common in 2005?

I'd definitely consider..... the keyboard snd the aspect ratio of the screen are perfect, if I could speed it up, even better...

Nice one!

I truly miss the old IBM Thinkpads. Last one I had lasted a decade.

They really don’t make it easy. Sometimes they try, but they forget that not everyone is a programmer or just has 50 years of context to understand computer terminology

GG dood excellent link =] mucho thnx

Love T43 and T43p ♥

Less þat its more complicated, more þat you aren’t used to it and you are used to windows. Or he has a complicated/more CLI based setup. I personally use enough GUIs þat some in linux communities would dislike me for it, but you can generally ignore þe toxicity of þe larger community.

Linux for Windows Admins by Mark Minasi is amazing too

I tried puppy. It is way more confusing þan it should be.

I tried several Linux distros on the Toshiba Atom and (for me) the best results were with Bodhi

That's what I like about Linux, multiple flavors to trial and error until YOU decide what works best on your machine

Just go with ubuntu flavors. Small distros are stupid.

I just bought a $150, 13.3” thinkpad chromebook. The build quality is absurd in the best possible way.

Don’t that me, friend, but I think your “th” is broken

Awesome!

I miss my T61P! These were beasts in their time. Made my EE coursework easier to bear (less waiting for computer to catch up) AND I could game on it since the discrete GPU was basically and 8600GT. Good times.

I love linux but boy is it a pain to do most things on. I've worked on Linux desktops and Linux servers for 10+ years. I still end up with issues like "oh you updated your kernel but your graphics drivers didn't automatically resetup, time to restart into the command line and now you get to figure out how to configure nvidia drivers from cli. ENJOY! Hope you didn't want to actually start working!"

The alternative to that seems to be "great you use a distro that updates packages ever decade. Here is this new app you gotta use for work to get the thing you want to do done but it requires libbullshit 2.0.1 but you have libbullshit 1.0.-1 installed. Enjoy figuring out a workaround! Typically I then just extract it to ~/bin and manually compile everything then put ~/bin in my path but really it takes 10 times more time to install something on linux than windows where it's click -> click -> click -> launch -> working.

I'm really waiting for someone to take linux and offer a better workflow for installing things. The windows ecosystem got it right when it just included most libraries next to the executable in order as a fallback.

Oh, the Thinkpad T43 was a fantastic laptop!

That was my prime laptop for several years. Excellent build quality, and really good monitor for the day. I especially like the rubberized coating.

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Old ThinkPads and Linux. Name a more iconic duo

I can relate! Going on 3 years with my T480s, wouldn't trade it for anything else. Thinkpad keyboards are out of this world, not to mention the trackpoint.

And running Linux, nice!

And they felt like it! 😆 They were heavy! My laptop bag broke on the busiest and most pickpocket dense railway station in my country just when I got off the train. Thud! Lots of legs but I managed to grab it before someone else could.

Not wiþ snaps i wont

Linux > windows

You're right, 32 bit

You can't even browse reddit on it. The soy devs who own reddit are in a racket with google and all the others to deliberately make everything bloated.

Reddit has one animation that I'm obsessed with. When you view a profile on a phone and as you scroll, the pfp gets smaller and appears after the name.

A good high-bandwidth, low-latency network connection such as you might find at a university was great back then because it meant you often retrieve anything from the Internet faster than you could load it from your HDD.

Mind you, fast network connections are still great, but the days when the Internet could be faster than local storage are pretty much gone.

Figures that the kind of guy who insists on using Linux would be the kind of guy who insists on using thorn. ;)

Kinda right, but i do use windows for gaming

Same here. In general it works good, but in some cases it's like they have their priorities backwards, regarding what they make easy. I soon need to upgrade from 19.3 in order to keep getting security updates, but it's a "major upgrade", which is high risk and requires command line knowledge. I can do it, unless something goes wrong (which I estimate to a 40% risk), then I'd need to know every detail about how the system works to troubleshoot and correct it. I always take full disk backups before upgrading, but that will only get me back to the old version, not help me with a successful upgrade...

See, that's exactly the kind of thing I mean. There's no reason you should need command knowledge just to update. Really, needing command knowledge to do any basic functions is pretty user unfriendly

Indeed. It's stupid. Mint is better than many other distros, but I can't say it's good. It has pretty much modern functionality day-to-day-wise (AFAIK, I haven't used Windows 10 or newer much, and Mac not at all), but even things like updating, repairing file systems after not unmounting before disconnecting something, and other necessary but rarely used functions are like Windows 98 level at best - sometimes DOS. If it wasn't for increasing privacy concerns with Windows, I would have stuck with it. Open source philosophy is better, but the current state of the distros I've tried is definitely not. Nor the availability of information, when problems occur.

Privacy concerns are a big one. I've been holding on to windows 7 for as long as possible but it's getting to the point that a lot just won't work with it. I'd like to switch to Linux, it's just not easy

Agreed.

does it run well? i have a old t43 with broken screen, and i was wondering if i should buy a screen and maybe hook it up to an ssd via a usb 3.0 to sata cable i have.

Try a lighter desktop environment

unrelated to this sub, I always preferred that little baby joystick thing in the middle over a touchpad. I imagine it must be patented by IBM or something and that's why it seems like no other company ever does it.