Ancient laptop with Puppy Linux

The burglar that "visited" our house a couple of weeks ago took our laptops and tablets. Luckily our desktops were left alone (probably to heavy). Also a very old IBM Thinkpad T40 was left behind. The burglar probably thought it didn't have any value. That was a bit of luck for me because with a little effort this 12 year old laptop is still very usable. After all these years the only thing that failed in this laptop was the battery. Everything else is still in excellent condition. These Thinkpads were (are?) very sturdy. On top of that they are very modular. Almost every component is easy accessible with just a screw driver. Very different from modern laptops that are almost impossible to open without special equipment.

The twelve years old IBM Thinkpad T40. Is it worth reviving it?

With a 1.4GHz Pentium M inside the T40 is, I suspect, hardly faster than the Raspberry Pi 2. I therefore needed an Operating System that isn't a burden for this hardware. Since Windows XP isn't an option anymore I looked at Linux and decided to give Puppy Linux 5.7 Slacko a spin.

Puppy Linux is very small and it loads into the ramdisk and is therefore very zippy , even on old machines. Installing it on the Thinkpad T40 was easy. It recognized all hardware even the wifi (which can be a problem with other distro's). Unfortunately I can't use the wifi chip inside the T40 because the WPA2 security protocol that I use in my network is unknown to this chip. This was easily solved with a wifi USB-stick.

Now I'm typing this blog from the T40. Firefox (version 17 ESR) works fine. I can access Google+, Youtube and other sites without problems although the rendering of some sites isn't perfect. With Geany I can create html/css pages and code Python. Wordprocessing is done with Abiword and spreadsheets with Gnumeric.

Do I want my laptops and tablets back? Of course but in the mean time I thank Barry Kauler and Co for this wonderful distro.

Puppy Linux Slacko 5.7 runs fine on this very old laptop.

Typing my blog on the T40 without a problem.