distro for an old Thinkpad
Hi - I've been setting up an old Thinkpad R51 as Protolab's small CNC controller. I've been trying to use Debian 8, but it seems not to like the Radeon 250M in the machine at *all*. I'm stuck with "an error occurred / click here to log out", and no sshd to access the machine remotely. Can anyone suggest a light(ish) graphical distro that's user focussed and will allow fairly recent packaged apps like Cura and LinuxCNC to run? I realise that this Thinkpad is slower than a Raspberry Pi 3 (I benchmarked it) but it does have a parallel port that we can use with the ZenBot CNC. cheers, Stewart
I've had good luck, when I needed it, with Puppy. Reasonable support for devices and an awareness that it'll be used on low horsepower systems. HTH. - Evan (via mobile) On 22 Apr 2016, 19:15, at 19:15, "Stewart C. Russell" <scruss@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi - I've been setting up an old Thinkpad R51 as Protolab's small CNC controller. I've been trying to use Debian 8, but it seems not to like the Radeon 250M in the machine at *all*. I'm stuck with "an error occurred / click here to log out", and no sshd to access the machine remotely.
Can anyone suggest a light(ish) graphical distro that's user focussed and will allow fairly recent packaged apps like Cura and LinuxCNC to run? I realise that this Thinkpad is slower than a Raspberry Pi 3 (I benchmarked it) but it does have a parallel port that we can use with the ZenBot CNC.
cheers, Stewart
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On 16-04-22 08:33 PM, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
I've had good luck, when I needed it, with Puppy. Reasonable support for devices and an awareness that it'll be used on low horsepower systems.
Another option in the style of Puppy Linux is DSL (Damn Small Linux). It depends on how stripped down a distro would still suit you as the basis for what you want to do with it. -- Cheers! Kevin. http://www.ve3syb.ca/ |"Nerds make the shiny things that distract Owner of Elecraft K2 #2172 | the mouth-breathers, and that's why we're | powerful!" #include <disclaimer/favourite> | --Chris Hardwick
On 22 April 2016 at 20:58, Kevin Cozens <kevin@ve3syb.ca> wrote:
On 16-04-22 08:33 PM, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
I've had good luck, when I needed it, with Puppy. Reasonable support for devices and an awareness that it'll be used on low horsepower systems.
Another option in the style of Puppy Linux is DSL (Damn Small Linux). It depends on how stripped down a distro would still suit you as the basis for what you want to do with it.
I loved DSL - I thought it was the best small distro out there. But I say it in the past tense as it hasn't been updated since 2012: doesn't seem like a good choice anymore. -- Giles http://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr@gmail.com
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 On 04/22/2016 11:59 PM, Giles Orr wrote:
... in the style of Puppy Linux is DSL (Damn Small Linux)...
I loved DSL ... in the past tense as it hasn't been updated since 2012...
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/category_lead_developers.html cf. http://tinycorelinux.net/Team_TC.html you might also check out http://lxde.org/ and lubuntu... "128 MB of RAM is considered the minimal requirements for a usable Lubuntu Desktop system." from https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Lubuntu/GetLubuntu - -- Daniel Villarreal http://www.youcanlinux.org youcanlinux@gmail.com PGP key 2F6E 0DC3 85E2 5EC0 DA03 3F5B F251 8938 A83E 7B49 https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xF2518938A83E7B49 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2 iQEcBAEBCAAGBQJXGy+qAAoJEPJRiTioPntJyCUIAIvXoGCPPYeGPWWoXrYxs6Vn /uovQbowRDNdxXNjiMZHRGvZzSicsC66vBtyXD1QtgYA9H5OHHAe5Qzikbfdpvpq k2HSRfegey2M7iCyzdyXrUpV0e87gNhd5KeU/0QP8P3LcZN21RRp8QclUUmNKFFl QvPKO0vUEbgd4choUSmoqW/nY25gkBQDexIYG1+0TqfhroZCgoQangLjoSVbUx1W O346J5+fgyP6B5CzyeF0KhBzv5L9FVi4mF9lLT6DYtay/y3DSmQFTQjJ8ZCCwQdA Wue+SVs3Qyh1R3AjxifyoaTd3TlcMT2NCTtCyD8c7QDBsZa63JX1u33V33tmDqg= =130K -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
On 2016-04-23 04:17 AM, Daniel Villarreal wrote:
you might also check out http://lxde.org/ and lubuntu...
I'm going to give lubuntu a shot - but the machine is a Pentium M, so I'll have to try to work around PAE issues. I looked at Puppy before, but its packaging system is not ideal. It's better than Yocto is one good thing I can say for it. To Hugh's comment, yes, a Raspberry Pi 3 is often faster than this machine. I ran ByteMark on this vs a bunch of machines I have about the house*, and the Pi 3 came out faster than the R51, and also faster than a ~2009 Atom dual core. Stewart *: including an Intel/Arduino Galileo, which was utterly dire.
On Sun, Apr 24, 2016 at 08:47:33AM -0400, Stewart C. Russell wrote:
I'm going to give lubuntu a shot - but the machine is a Pentium M, so I'll have to try to work around PAE issues.
Pentium-M means 32-bit. I think it's matter of GUI desktop, rather than distro. - The lowest resource is Anti-X which is Debian based, so you can at least "apt-get" what you want. - CrunchBang++ might be next, also Debian based. If that fails, you can always do Debian/Ubuntu + Desktop of your choice. -- William
| From: Stewart C. Russell <scruss@gmail.com> | the machine is a Pentium M, so | I'll have to try to work around PAE issues. Seems easy. The hard part is behind you: realizing that there is a problem and what it is. <https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PAE> How much RAM does it have? How much can it have? That's the main cause of machines becoming useless to me. | To Hugh's comment, yes, a Raspberry Pi 3 is often faster than this | machine. I ran ByteMark on this vs a bunch of machines I have about the | house*, and the Pi 3 came out faster than the R51, and also faster than | a ~2009 Atom dual core. OK. That is interesting. I don't have a feeling for ByteMark. I remember thinking it was a pretty simplistic set of benchmarks when it came out but it could have changed over the (30?) years. I seem to remember that it was designed without consideration of what optimizers might do. If I remember correctly, it is all about CPU processor speed. It might be testing memory bandwidth, but it might be small enough that everything fits in a modern processor's cache. But those are what I'm most interested in anyway. | *: including an Intel/Arduino Galileo, which was utterly dire. Not a surprise. But sad / funny. Is there anything interesting about a Galileo? Is its performance respectable for its power consumption?
I'm pleased to say that the old R51 is now a pretty capable - if a little pedestrian - 3D printer control box at Protolab. It's running Lubuntu 16.04LTS, which is surprisingly nice. On 2016-04-24 10:29 AM, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
Seems easy. The hard part is behind you: realizing that there is a problem and what it is. <https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PAE>
All it needed was 'forcepae --- forcepae' at the end of the initial Live CD boot, and it picked that up for running and the installation.
How much RAM does it have? How much can it have? That's the main cause of machines becoming useless to me.
1.5 GB, and that's the maximum.
I don't have a feeling for ByteMark.
Sorry, I miss-spoke - it's byte-unixbench <https://github.com/kdlucas/byte-unixbench>. I wanted something that would test a little more than raw CPU speed so I could triage old machines.
| *: including an Intel/Arduino Galileo, which was utterly dire.
Not a surprise. But sad / funny. Is there anything interesting about a Galileo? Is its performance respectable for its power consumption?
Not really. It runs Arduino sketches very slowly (like a few 10s of analogRead() calls every second). It draws about 15 W, and the fanless Quark SOC (400 MHz, Pentium Pro-ish, complete with FDIV bug) makes air above it shimmery-hot. It has no display capability. For reasons best described as "dunno", I have it set up with a mini-PCIe wireless card. It run Yocto Linux, which give immediately password-free access as root. It's twice as expensive as a Raspberry Pi, and gives an overall Byte Index of less than 1/4 of an original, single-core Raspberry Pi. cheers, Stewart
| From: Stewart C. Russell <scruss@gmail.com> | Hi - I've been setting up an old Thinkpad R51 as Protolab's small CNC | controller. I've been trying to use Debian 8, but it seems not to like | the Radeon 250M in the machine at *all*. I'm stuck with "an error | occurred / click here to log out", and no sshd to access the machine | remotely. Try booting with the kernel parameter "nomodeset". Somone suggested that to me yesterday and it worked for me (booting ubuntu 16.04 on a Windows tablet). Performance was terrible but better than a blank screen. | I realise that this Thinkpad is slower than a Raspberry Pi 3 (I | benchmarked it) Really? That surprises me. Details? | Can anyone suggest a light(ish) graphical distro that's user focussed | and will allow fairly recent packaged apps like Cura and LinuxCNC ... debian surely has a choice of desktops, including some that would fit the bill.
participants (7)
-
D. Hugh Redelmeier -
Daniel Villarreal -
Evan Leibovitch -
Giles Orr -
Kevin Cozens -
Stewart C. Russell -
William Park