IBM 600E Laptop and Gentoo Linux
I have recently finished installing Gentoo Linux on an old IBM 600E laptop. At one time I would have called this laptop a powerhorse, but that time is not today nor five years ago even. The laptop contains a Mobile Pentium II processor clocked at a racing 364MHz. It also contains a whopping total of 128MB of RAM. It has a single USB 1.x port and a shoddy DVD drive that doesn’t like DVDs at all. The only NIC it contains is a modem. As such, a few special considerations should be made when installing Linux on this machine. None of these are out of the ordinary for old laptops, and most are general guidelines for installation on old machines.
The most special of the issues with this laptop is its DVD drive. First off, it cannot read DVDs — at all. It says it can, but they will not be recognized. At first, we thought that the laptop could only properly read pressed CDs (as opposed to burned CDs). I have now come to find that this assumption isn’t entirely true. While it may help that a CD is pressed, it is not a guarantee. The problem seems to stem from some driver issues within Linux: The CD will load but will not be able to find itself once the kernel initializes. There are two ways around this:
1) Find another CD that works.
2) “dd if=<ISO image> of=<flash drive> bs=1M” – Create a flash drive with the same image you created the CD with. If the CD has USB flash drive support, which it should, then it can mount your flash drive as the root partition.
The next major problem is the lack of a NIC. This Monoprice USB to Ethernet adapter will do the trick. Use the “asix” and “usbnet” kernel modules for support. This NIC may not work on the Gentoo LiveCD for reasons unknown to me. Try KNOPPIX instead.
Once installed, be sure to set CFLAGS properly. I am using -O2, but -Os may suit you well due to the size of the hard drive. Gentoo warns against this, but the worst that could happen is that you have to recompile some packages with -O2 instead of -Os.
MAKEOPTS=”-j1″ is vital. With limited RAM, you don’t want to compile more than one file at a time.
Other than that, it’s a piece of cake! I have a new server running znc, a great IRC bouncer, and a Tor relay. In a while, I plan to make it a NAS server after getting a USB 2.0 PCMCIA card.
So the purpose is for what? Nice job with the retro!