An ancient IBM Thinkpad G40 laptop saved from the curb

[Minux1]

Successfully installed Linux Mint XFCE 32 bit on a original IBM branded Thinkpad G40 (P4 3.0 GHz, 80 GB HDD, 2GB RAM, 64 MB video card RAM).
It was considered a highly resourced machine in its day and by todays standards is a big, clunker of a machine.
It originally had XP Pro installed on it.
It runs LM at a respectable (quite satisfactory) speed.
I used the old Thinkpads RJ45 Ethernet connection which worked right away with LMs drivers for the installation downloading.
A little tinkering getting the WiFi card which was playing "bashful first date" with my router working but now they're working fine together.
If the old Thinkpad was the only computer I had (it isn't by a long shot) it would fulfill my needs.

[Minux1]

Forgot to mention that the LM XFCE version # was 19.2 that I installed on the IBM Thinkpad G40.

[Neil Edmond]

Congrats on getting the big old beast up and running again! That's one model ThinkPad I've never owned. I have had a few A31p models, but they've all since died. Though I do still have an A30p in barely working condition. It has a bad graphics chip which won't work with either xorg or IBM drivers, but will work OK with VESA or generic Windows driver, so I'm still limping along with it when I get nostalgic.

[Minux1]

It seems that the more well endowed IBM Thinkpads are the most salvageable ones.
I think the G40 and G41 were just about at the end of the IBM branded line of laptops.
A 3 GHz P4 and 2 GB RAM with a 80 GB HDD made this G40 a Titan in its day.
64 mb video RAM is pathetically shy by today´s standards with modern graphic cards going over 4GB.
Regardless, the G40s desktop is a lot crisper and more attractive with LM than it ever was with XP.
I remember the un-boxing in the office with everybody staring wide eyed as if they expected a terminator robot to step out of the box.
Not commensurate with the modern times portable solution paradigm.
There´s got to be 5 pounds of copper in that old beast.

[Minux1]

Incidentally, I ran Puppy Linux from the disk for a while on the IBM G40 but the Puppy environment has pretty bare cupboards and I decided the laptop could handle an o/s higher up on the evolutionary scale like Linux Mint v19.2 XFCE and I was right.

[Minux1]

Hope Linux Mint doesn't drop the "we're dropping 32 bit support" bomb on us in 2023.

[athi]

Hope Linux Mint doesn't drop the "we're dropping 32 bit support" bomb on us in 2023.

Thought that was more an Ubuntu driven thing, which seems to be going away after the backlash Ubuntu got after the announcement.

[Minux1]

Hope Linux Mint doesn't drop the "we're dropping 32 bit support" bomb on us in 2023.

Thought that was more an Ubuntu driven thing, which seems to be going away after the backlash Ubuntu got after the announcement.

Well, truth be told LM is essentially "an Ubuntu driven thing" … so take it from there.
Would be nice to get another 3 year lease on life after 2023 for our beloved legacy 32 bit rigs.

[SpookyWatcher]

I've got an old daily driver that I built in 2006 runnin cinnamon 18.3 32bit

e4300 @ 3.0 Ghz (highly overclocked for over 13 years!)
Gigabyte GA-965P-S3
7900GS
4 Gb Ram
Samsung 860 ssd

This thing is still more than adequate. Best build I ever did.

I'll be streaming Hulu live tv, updating and maintaining my servers, and emailing etc etc etc without even a slow down.

God bless Linux and everyone working on it. Keeping my old rigs relevant. Speaking of which...here comes another donation!

[Minux1]

The tour of the Jurassic Park of legacy computers continues:
I bought 2 x Acer AO532h-2388 notebooks for $25.
The HDDs were gone in both cases and they were factory loaded with 1 GB RAM.
These netbooks are different than my Acer AOA150 netbook in that their Atom N450 processors are 32/64 bit rather than the 32 bit only capabilities of the N270 processors in the AOA150s possibly making them future expandable once 32 bit goes out the window.
I installed new 500 GB SSD drives and 2 GB RAM modules (pulls from other scraped computers) in each one and LM v19.2 xfce 64 bit on one and W10 64 bit on the other.
Other than a few tweaks the LM v19.2 xfce installation is done. Everything I needed was already there in the excellent portfolio of programs LM provides.
I still have office suite and AV suites to install on the W10 machine.
Both are running well with no problems.
Windows and Linux on 2 identical machines.
Already Linux Mint is winning the contest hands down.