IBM Thinkpad 770Z Installation for a newbie

I have a IBM thinkpad 770Z / Pentium II 366 / 320MB RAM / DVD / External Floppy drive / Enhanced Video Adapter - VIVO card / 13.3 SXGA LCD 1280 x 1024 resolution / Linsys PMCCIA version 1 WPC 11 802.11b Wireless network card

I have the updated BIOS, will install OS from CD, has Windows XP currently installed (I installed it for testing and it works but I cannot activated as it is already activated on my home PC)

I have

Mandrake Linux 7.2 one cd from Linux 4 Windows
Mandrake Linux 8.1 three cd from Linux central.com
Mandrake Linux 9.0 seven cd from ebay - was a copy on cdr - not excatly what was advertised
Red Hat 7 three cd from "red hat linux 7 for dummies" allong with the book

My experience with linux...none to speak of...only got one installation to work

Example #1 I bought Linux 4 windows and tried to test it on my windows pc and accidentealy installed it native and wiped out everything, it worked great

Examble #2 I bought the linux central cds and installed them in a virtual machine via VirtualPC 4.0, never got the sound to work palyed around with it for a while

Example #3 tried to install on laptop listed above the 7 cd set...system would hang up during the install gui ( Ieven left it overnight ..it said may take a while...) and never could get it to install

Example #4 thied to install 3 cd Linux central version on same laptop after getting hardrive cleaned up....same results as #3 system freezed up on the install gui...

after this I gave up and tried to go back to windows, hard drive was nonresponsive, fdisk and fips would not work, I even instlled into another pc as a slave and tried to use partition magic to clear the drive. partition magic said the drive was bad, , heck it was a laptop hdd and 6 years old

I broke down and boght a new 20 gig IBM hdd and put it in and put on windws xp....

OK the laptop works, everything smoothly....I need some help because obviously I am doing something wrong

is anybody willing to help out a complete noob get into the linux world

thanks all

Didn't you say that it worked great in the 1st example? If so, with what do you need help exactly?

In any case, try installing Mdk 9.0 or RH 7 in text mode. At least RH has that option, although I'm not sure about Mdk. That way, it won't start the GUI and as such won't hang during the install.

All the distros that you mentioned are more or less old; you might want to download a newer version, like RedHat 9 or Mandrake 9.2 (9.2 is the latest, right?).

i thought about that, you have to have a subcription to download now? I downloaded 8.1 once for free but I went ahead and bought the linux central disks because they were only $5. actually the one that went well was on my regular pc. and it was an accident, I was trying to set up a dual boot. I check ed the red hat compatibiliy lists for my hard ware and nothing really was there that old. I really dont want to put it on my home pc beacuse of the windows propretoty software their for my video editing projects, ...too much money spent to just throw it away.


i just want to set up something to move gracefully, and I am hoping my the next windows distribution that comes out , I won't care, and wont need to waste the money

You certainly don't need a subscription to download it. Since everything on the CDs is free software, they cannot legally keep it away from people. To download RedHat, check their list of mirrors for a site near you:
http://www.redhat.com/download/mirror.html

I'm sure that Mandrake has something like that, but I'd recommend RedHat for now. RedHat's installer seems to have less problems in my experience.

do i need i386 or Disk ISO

i386 on that page doesn't refer to disk images at all. Disk ISOs is what you want.

ok now i386 or rpms

rpms? Do you mean SRPMS? In that case, i386. SRPMS is the source code.

ok thanks...may take me a whille will post back when I am ready, should I be looking for drivers or anything?, is the windows hardware manager good enough to identify my components or should I use something like HWINFO or the like. Are there any recommendations for site to find drivers and such at. one thing is my video card in this thing, it is a trident cyberbladeDVD (as identified by windowsXP, only drivers I found were windows 95 and 98, it is using winxp native drivers

XFree86 comes with a trident driver, so that should work good enough. Do you have any USB modem or the like?