Solaris System

Hexaitos – 12 Apr 2020

Adventures in setting up a T60 with a modern OS — Awaiting the laptop

I’ve been meaning to get a secondary laptop for a long time but I have for some reason kept putting it off — but that is no more! I decided to get an old IBM ThinkPad T60 which is a laptop I had previously used as well; in fact, I still have a photo that I took of my T61 way back when.

Therefore, I thought it would be great to have another one of these very sturdy and nigh indestructible laptops to take with me when I have to go places for work (or just a nice laptop that I can take with me whenever I go to the woods or something).

Thus, a few days ago I started looking online to see if I could find a nice old ThinkPad for a somewhat low price; and, luckily, a day ago I finally found one! Someone in my city was selling an old IBM ThinkPad T60 for merely €25 which I thought was a decent price. It has 2048 MB of RAM and an Intel Core 2 Duo with 1.8 GHz which is perfect for what I need. The battery still works too, apparently, but it doesn’t have a lot of capacity left it seems.

This may be mitigated slightly by not using Windows and instead installing one of my very minimal Arch GNU/Linux installs. But since there are a tonne of batteries still available for this type of laptop, I could quite easily buy a new one — which, funnily enough, cost as much as the laptop or even more (€19.99 to €35 for a new battery, depending on the manufacturer and capacity)

I will be getting the laptop tomorrow and I will post here again with some more updates. I will try installing Arch or Manjaro with either DWM or i3-gaps (I’m not entirely sure which one I’ll choose yet) and it should hopefully work somewhat well.

Depending on what kind of RAM / HDD is installed in the computer, I will be upgrading it somewhat. 100 GB of HDD should be more than enough for my uses, but I was unfortunately unable to figure out how much disk space the machine actually has; and I will perhaps upgrade the RAM slightly (to 4 GB), depending on the kind of RAM that is installed on the machine (My guess is SODIMM DDR2, but I’m not 100% certain).

Well, we’ll hear from each other tomorrow!

Hexaitos ("Hex") is a non-binary/kingender dragon shapeshifter (polytherian) serving as the system's main fronter/host. Prefers "it/its" pronouns but, depending on the current form, may use others such as "he/him" or "she/her". While capable of shifting into multiple kintypes and animal forms, it nowadays primarily uses its dragon form. Tech-focused, Hex tinkers with software/hardware on Linux/*nix systems (especially OpenBSD), self-hosts services, and hoards domains due to abundant project ideas. Enjoys birds, walks, photography, language learning (including Ancient Greek), gaming, and ancient history. Currently developing Theriodex (a Pokédex site) and maintains a personal tech/blog site.