Hardware museum: year 1999

Biggest laptop of the year with Linux (by IBM)



IBM ThinkPad 570E 26446AG (24 devices on board) with Alpine 3.12.1

It's a more powerful version of model 570.

HW: Intel Pentium III (Coppermine), one memory module (Module 128MB), one drive (IBM DARA-212000 12GB) and more 24 devices.

Kernel: 5.4.72-0-lts

PROBE ID

QuoteYou can replace the modem with a MiniPCI WLAN card, but the 570s are very picky. Broadcom BCM4306KFB and Cisco MPI350 wireless cards work, most others (Atheros, Intel 2100bg, 2200bg) do not work.

QuoteThe display hinges of the 570 series often wear out. The display cable is insufficiently protected, so it often suffers from the stress and display errors (gray screen, flickering) occur.

QuoteGetting a Linux distribution to run on that device won't be that big of a problem. Getting it to be comfortable to work with it will be, it might even turn out to be impossible. Let me use a naïve fallacy, an extreme simplification:

My processor in my main machine is an Intel i5 3570k with a clock rate of 3,40GHz per core. When it's totally idling, with nothing but i3wm running it uses, according to top, around one percent of it's first core's total capabilities - that would be around 34MHz which equals to ten percent of OP's total processing capabilities. The RAM usage is around 40MB when I disable all services that are autostarted, with a lot of fine tuning I could probably bring it down to 20MB. That would be more than 10% of OP's total memory, in the best case of this thing being fully equipepped. Running a terminal session with xterm is around 15MB, with eterm I get around 10MB of memory being used, firing up vim for editing python script adds another 15MB.

So without really doing anything we are up to nearly 1/3 of the RAM available being used. Especially as a beginner you might want to have a reference open to memorize or recheck the Syntax. And that's the part where it gets really tricky. Even Midori might overwhelm this machine and lynx is on one hand hard for beginners and on the other hand problematic with some modern pages, such as the Python documentation.

QuoteYou could always get a newer refurbished Thinkpad from ebay.... but where's the fun in that.

QuoteThis machine is a rather old model (mine made 11/99), manufacturing was stopped 07/2000. It is a one-spindle notebook, 1.8kg nominal weight, very thin (1"), FDD and CD are in the Ultrabay. Screen is 13.3" TFT. CPU is Pentium 300-366 MHz or Celeron 366-400 depending on model (I have 2644-1AU with PII 333 MHz and 2644-3AU with PII 366 MHz), motherboard is based on classic Intel 440BX chipset. Video adapter is NeoMagic 2200, with 2.5MB of video RAM. Sound: Crystal 4297 chip; machine has microphone in, line in and speaker out connectors. Lucent WinModem is built-in. One USB 1.1 port is provided, second is available in the Ultrabase. I have never tested infrared port under Windows or FreeBSD. All hardware is fully supported by FreeBSD 5 and 6 and X.Org, but sometimes needs some tweaking.

QuoteI have a ibm thinkpad 570 2644-cdu with a p2 300mhtz 128 meg ram and 10 gig harddrive. I am running redhat 9 with a 2.4.20 kernel custom compiled. The problem is that apm does not work. When I hit fn f4 which is supposed to suspend the computer it suspends just fine. but when I do it again to bring the system back up it blinks beeps and reboots, the says that it can not find init because it could not mount the root filesystem. Then hibernate just does not work.

QuoteWant to install LMDX on an old laptop. The laptop in question is an IBM ThinkPad 570 (366MHz PII, 320MB RAM, 6.4GB HD) currently running Lubuntu 10.10. I've been warned that the next version of Lubuntu won't run on this hardware (it has a meagre 2.5MB of video RAM), so I'm keen to try Linux Mint Debian Xfce. BUT - it appears that all new LM releases are only available as DVD images. This machine, like much old hardware, doesn't have a DVD drive and its BIOS doesn't offer any options to boot from a USB drive of any description.

I think that what I have to do is to download the LMDX iso and use UNetbootin to prepare a bootable USB drive. Then I have to find a boot manager that will run from a floppy drive, so that the machine will boot from the floppy, the boot manager will recognise the USB drive and we're hot to trot. Candidates for the boot manager that I've found so far are PLoP, Smart Boot Manager or WakePup (which may need tweaking).

QuoteI have old IBM Thinkpad 570E (PIII 500 Mhz, 256 RAM) running puppy 4.x series with acpi=force boot parameter.

Its fan will go ON when reaches 70 C, and above 80 C is critical and suddenly it will shutdown, it seems the fan can't catch up with the heat. This happens when using internet for long and big download or playing online (whatever force the cpu to run hard).

QuoteAntix M8 latest version on IBM Thinkpad 570. I've got M8 running quite nicely on an IBM Thinkpad 570. It has a pcmcia wireless card which has worked flawlessly since first install. Getting the sound working was a bit of a hassle, as it needs the CS46xx driver, which is no longer included in the debian distro of alsa as it contains some proprietary code... I read somewhere on the internet that if you recompiled ALSA from source packages it would include the CS46xx driver - unfortunately ALSA doesn't want to compile on the latest kernels. Argh. Eventually I found that you could just compile the ALSA drivers from source (and they compile happily on later kernels -phew!) - and keep ALSA from the synaptics package. The sound now works great.

I've installed XFree86 and got rid of xorg. Why? This laptop has a Neomagic NM2200 card in it, in my experience the XFree86 drivers are faster than the XOrg drivers. I get glxgears at about 90fps with XFree86, I get some awful looking o/p with XOrg.

I tried to get rox-desktop running. Oroborox keeps crashing. All the menus and toolbars are unpopulated. So I am sticking with ICEwm for now. What I would really like is a trashcan and desktop CDROM/DVDROM icons.

I can play full-screen AVIs from DVDrips using mplayer and they look great. DVDs don't want to play yet for some reason.

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