Any advice before installing FreeBSD on a ThinkPad 600E?

crhide

crhide

Hi there, newbie here with one of those classic vague questions. :)

What suggestions do you have for installing and running FreeBSD on a ThinkPad 600E?

I'll try to add more specifics to the question.

The computer has:
40GB IDE hard disk
Pentium 2 processor
128MB RAM
CD-ROM drive
PCMCIA ethernet card

So clearly it's not going to be anything fast, it's not going to be useful for a whole lot. But I figured since once upon a time it ran Windows 98 okay enough, maybe it'd make a nice web browser and NotePad with something more lightweight than windows.

From my experiences using linux desktops at work the choice of window manager is important with limited resources. Which would be most ideal for this scenario? XFCE has always been a favourite of mine but I've never used it on such a dinosaur before.

Any tips I should know about for these situations, small install options or anything? Bearing in mind that whilst I don't fear the command line, I like the friendly 'clickies'.

Many thanks to anyone that's read this far. And more so to anyone with any advice. :D
 
I have used FreeBSD on Pentium III 700MHz laptop with 256MB RAM and on AMD K6-2 500MHz with 192 RAM, it was running ok.

I used X11/fluxbox/opera/geany/abiword/gnumeric/galculator/gimp/... in these boxes and it all worked quite well.

Just forget any kinds of DE like GNOME/KDE/XFCE there.
 
Thanks for the reply! :D

Well I finally took the time to get freebsd FreeBSD installed. That went well since I've been following the online manuals.

Decided to install xorg from the ports collection, but it's taking forever. Mostly because none of the fetch ftp urls seem to work. They either give a timeout error (after about a minute of doing nothing) or say 'not logged in'.

I've set the ftp timeout to 5 seconds now and that's sped things up. But I'm wondering if there's something I've not done to cause all of the ftp urls to fail?

Is there some secret ftp username and password I need for these ftp servers?
 
What version of FreeBSD? Did you update the ports tree first? An old ports tree will be trying to download distfiles that have been removed from many sources.

On a machine that slow, packages will save a lot of building time.
 
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