Tiny Core Linux

General TC => General TC Talk => Topic started by: hexeta on February 23, 2011, 02:02:02 PM

Title: Would my old 600E Thinkpad like Tiny Core, and what about WiFi??
Post by: hexeta on February 23, 2011, 02:02:02 PM

Just saying "Hello" and looking for advice
I'm new to the wonders of Linux  :) and have been wrestling with Mint 9  Lxde on the above machine.

I think maybe I was badly advised to use it on this puny machine!
It has a 3GB HDD, 288mb RAM, (2x128 and 32mb "nailed in") which I'm told is the max this machine can use.
it has a P2 CPU running at 366Mhz.

My first problem with Mint ....and I suspect with Tiny Core, is that I don't have any way of connecting a LAN cable. (Too mean to buy a PCMCIA Card :D)
I need to be able to activate my WIFI PCMCIA card immediately.
This was not a problem with Mint......can I expect the same ease of activation with Tiny Core?

That's a bit of a "ballbreaker", since without wifi, I'll need to try another distro.....but what! :o

I Also found that the Thinkpad has an odd sound chip set up, and this took quite a while to sort....never actually beat it into submission, and when sound was lost at re-boot, I sometimes couldn't get it back......... for weeks!

Just recently, any attempt to save files or install applications can result in "Error, No Disk Space" When that happens, it somehow corrupts my log-in details, and the blasted machine forgets who I am! ;D
Thus now would be a good time to try a leaner Distro!

I wonder what that does!...wow, cool! 8)[move]

Stop it or I'll cut yer fingers off![/move]

Title: Re: Would my old 600E Thinkpad like Tiny Core, and what about WiFi??
Post by: Rich on February 23, 2011, 02:27:26 PM

Hi hexeta
Tinycore does not do wireless out of the box. What you can do is take a USB pendrive
and a CD with TC on it and boot it on a wired machine. Call up AppBrowser and find the
wireless packages you need and save them to the pendrive, then move them to your
machine.

Title: Re: Would my old 600E Thinkpad like Tiny Core, and what about WiFi??
Post by: hexeta on February 23, 2011, 02:35:27 PM

Thanks Rich, never thought of doing that! ::)

I'll burn me a CD! ;)

Pity I can't get the Thinkpad to boot from it's one and only USB 1:1 port, then I could save the cost of CDRW's

Title: Re: Would my old 600E Thinkpad like Tiny Core, and what about WiFi??
Post by: thane on February 23, 2011, 03:04:45 PM

I ran TCL for about a year on a box with a read-only CD drive and USB 1.1. I had to boot off the CD but could save the extensions, preferences, etc. on a USB stick. If you don't want to go through the hassle of installing to the hard drive (on my box it was unreliable and later dead) that's an alternative.

Title: Re: Would my old 600E Thinkpad like Tiny Core, and what about WiFi??
Post by: hexeta on February 23, 2011, 03:23:33 PM

Thanks thane,
Mine also has only the CD ROM unit, ever grateful for small mercies, I burn my CDR (not RW as I stated in error) on my main machine.
I don't mind installing to HDD, but it is just so small, 3GB what I need to know is if Tiny Core, once installed will say to it's self........"Wow! plenty of room in here!"
Or if there will be no room left for other things once the OS is installed.
I'm also considering DSL and Puppy.
The only thing hampering my deliberations is the distinct lack of mental ability to acomplish said task! :-[

Title: Re: Would my old 600E Thinkpad like Tiny Core, and what about WiFi??
Post by: tinypoodle on February 23, 2011, 04:00:16 PM

http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php?topic=8067.15

might concern you regarding sound.

Title: Re: Would my old 600E Thinkpad like Tiny Core, and what about WiFi??
Post by: hexeta on February 23, 2011, 04:34:58 PM

Hmmm....this seems to be old ground that I trod in late November when I was trying to get the sound to work with Mint 9 Lxde installed.
I don't recall the nitty gritty of my trials and tribulations (it was a long road!) but do recall having to disable "Quickboot" and also having to use a "Terminal Command" to activate a module named cs_4236.
This randomly resulted in me being rewarded with Stereophonic excitement! ::)
It was short lived and died with each re-boot....until I added an entry to the "/etc. >  Modules file".
It sounds (encouragingly) as if this problem can be solved in Puppy in the same way it was in Mint.

Title: Re: Would my old 600E Thinkpad like Tiny Core, and what about WiFi??
Post by: Lee on February 23, 2011, 07:08:14 PM

Quote

I don't mind installing to HDD, but it is just so small, 3GB what I need to know is if Tiny Core, once installed will say to it's self........"Wow! plenty of room in here!"
Or if there will be no room left for other things once the OS is installed.

I regularly run Tiny Core from a 4 GB USB stick.  The boot and tce directories together take well under 1GB (and I have a pretty complete set of apps in the tce directory), leaving the rest free for whatever data I choose to keep there.  I use my actual hard disk for bulky stuff like my photo and music collections.  I also run TC on an older 300MHz box and it works fine, if not breathtakingly fast.  Your 3 GB hd shouldn't be a show stopper, nor should the 288MB or the 366MHz.  As you well know, that box won't be a screamer, but it should work.  The USB 1.1 may be a bit of a bottleneck.

I can't give any advice on the wireless issue as I'm still fully tethered.

Title: Re: Would my old 600E Thinkpad like Tiny Core, and what about WiFi??
Post by: OldAdamUser2 on February 23, 2011, 08:49:44 PM

3 gigs of drive space is plenty of room for TC. You can comfortably run a TC box with less than 100 MB for the OS. Stick with the tiny apps and you'll do fine. In fact the whole OS (complete with space for user files) fits nicely on a 1 gig USB stick. It is a little challenge to install without access to an ethernet connecction, but doable--and you won't regret it if you can get your system up and running.

Start by looking at the wiki pages. I did a section called netbook tips that might be of some help, but lots of different parts of the wiki are useful.

Title: Re: Would my old 600E Thinkpad like Tiny Core, and what about WiFi??
Post by: curaga on February 24, 2011, 01:08:58 AM

Depending on your wireless chipset, you might need to also grab firmware in addition to the wireless extensions.

Title: Re: Would my old 600E Thinkpad like Tiny Core, and what about WiFi??
Post by: hexeta on February 24, 2011, 07:44:44 AM

Thanks Lee and OldAdamUser2, I wish this lappy wasn't quite so old!
It would be nice to be able to use USB 2 to boot and run from, very tidy, and portable too!
Rich's idea about booting a TC disk on a tethered PC and downloading the necessary wireless packages to a USB stick ready for transfer to the lappy it appears would get round the initial lack of connectivity.

Forgive my ignorance in things Linux, but after much rooting around the net for a way to activate my Linksys WPC54GS PCMCIA wifi card, I found the solution for Mint was just to extract the "lsbcmnds.inf" file from the Linksys original windows driver folder and copy it into the wireless set up program when asked to "browse for the driver" and it worked like magic! ;D

Are things like this generally sorted in a similar way in other distros?

Title: Re: Would my old 600E Thinkpad like Tiny Core, and what about WiFi??
Post by: Juanito on February 24, 2011, 10:25:12 AM

This looks like it would work with the ndiswrapper extension - note that you would need both lsbcmnds.inf and lsbcmnds.sys

Title: Re: Would my old 600E Thinkpad like Tiny Core, and what about WiFi??
Post by: hexeta on February 24, 2011, 12:02:09 PM

Quote from: Juanito on February 24, 2011, 10:25:12 AM

This looks like it would work with the ndiswrapper extension - note that you would need both lsbcmnds.inf and lsbcmnds.sys

Hi Juanito, did you forget to post the link to "This"?  ;D
Or am I mis-reading your post and you are infact agreeing that the solution I found for Mint, would also work in TC but with the addition of the lsbcmnds.sys file?


Co-incidentally, I to used to live in Dubai!
Oh, how I miss it!

Happy days, but long, long hours.

Title: Re: Would my old 600E Thinkpad like Tiny Core, and what about WiFi??
Post by: tinypoodle on February 24, 2011, 02:10:31 PM

Quote from: hexeta on February 24, 2011, 07:44:44 AM

Thanks Lee and OldAdamUser2, I wish this lappy wasn't quite so old!
It would be nice to be able to use USB 2 to boot and run from, very tidy, and portable too!
Rich's idea about booting a TC disk on a tethered PC and downloading the necessary wireless packages to a USB stick ready for transfer to the lappy it appears would get round the initial lack of connectivity.

Forgive my ignorance in things Linux, but after much rooting around the net for a way to activate my Linksys WPC54GS PCMCIA wifi card, I found the solution for Mint was just to extract the "lsbcmnds.inf" file from the Linksys original windows driver folder and copy it into the wireless set up program when asked to "browse for the driver" and it worked like magic! ;D

Are things like this generally sorted in a similar way in other distros?

You could get a USB2 ports cardbus card, not to boot, but to have faster transfers and more ports as well.

That card model per se doesn't say much without specifying version nr. or chipset.
http://linux-wless.passys.nl/query_part.php?brandname=Linksys

ndiswrapper is either a temporary solution or a mean of last resort.

Title: Re: Would my old 600E Thinkpad like Tiny Core, and what about WiFi??
Post by: hexeta on February 24, 2011, 03:03:26 PM

Hi tinypoodle,
Not really bothered about USB 2 if I can't boot from it since ver.1 does all that I need (apart from boot!).
Here's where I eventually got the info to fire up the card in Mint:-
http://community.linuxmint.com/hardware/view/2987
Tech talk like "ndiswrapper" I just don't understand!
Maybe I'll get to understand it in time! :D

Title: Re: Would my old 600E Thinkpad like Tiny Core, and what about WiFi??
Post by: Juanito on February 24, 2011, 08:57:50 PM

Quote from: hexeta on February 24, 2011, 03:03:26 PM

Here's where I eventually got the info to fire up the card in Mint:-
http://community.linuxmint.com/hardware/view/2987
Tech talk like "ndiswrapper" I just don't understand!
Maybe I'll get to understand it in time! :D

Quote

Or am I mis-reading your post and you are infact agreeing that the solution I found for Mint, would also work in TC but with the addition of the lsbcmnds.sys file?

I'm agreeing that the mint solution might work in tc as I believe it is using ndiswrapper.

If you have the same hardware as the link, I would guess that you could use the b43 driver with suitable firmware, the wl driver or ndiswrapper. As its name suggests, ndiswrapper is a "wrapper" to enable windows drivers to be used in linux.

If you use the apps browser to navigate to the ndiswrapper extension, the info file explains how to use it. If you search these forums, there are posts on b43, wl and ndiswrapper.

Quote

Co-incidentally, I to used to live in Dubai!

I sometimes think I use it more as a base to travel from than live in, but it is fun.

Title: Re: Would my old 600E Thinkpad like Tiny Core, and what about WiFi??
Post by: oldgit485 on February 25, 2011, 08:44:30 AM

Hi, persevere I have two 600e running really well using Linksys WPC55AG pcmcia card for wireless and Alsa for sound it all works really well.TC is the best of all the distros I have tried.
Rgds
oldgit

Title: Re: Would my old 600E Thinkpad like Tiny Core, and what about WiFi??
Post by: hexeta on February 25, 2011, 09:13:53 AM

Quote from: Juanito

If you use the apps browser to navigate to the ndiswrapper extension, the info file explains how to use it. If you search these forums, there are posts on b43, wl and ndiswrapper.

The phrase chicken and egg springs to mind  ;D but I know what you mean!
Ijust hope that TC is not too command line based, 'cos that'll confuse the hell outa me! ::)
I have been prommised a 20GB drive, so once I get that, I want to try several distros that I think might suit this old box!
TC, Puppy 5.2 and Zorin 4 Lite.
Any opinions/advice from members on the selection I've made would be appreciated!

oldgit485, thanks for the encouragement, from my total lack of Linux experience, I get the feeling that these Thinkpads perhaps present more of a challenge to get everything working correctly (in anything but Windows) than other machines, but for some reason, they are quite endearing little boxes!
(And they're built like the proverbial "Brick Khazi" ;))