My Thinkpad 600x has a CD drive that apparently only kind of works, and hardware that is quite weak for modern operating systems, so lets see how far we can get, with and without some trickery to work around the booting issues. This is mostly serves to illustrate that the cd drive is weird, but might als works as a general indication of what is possible. Later i might add articles that go deeper into the different operating system , for example a Gentoo install walktrough.

workarounds

Here i just put the cd into the drive and see what happens, later i will "cheat" a bit to get started with linux.

Starts just fine, ISOLINUX loads, and linux starts booting too, even so far that OpenRC is running, but it fails at some point with the following messages.

that's all i feel like copying manually :D, for more i would need a rs232 adapter

Started out being a pain in the rear, since after one attempt the computer didn't want to boot the cd anymore, after that ISOLINUX load fine again, but kernel decompression fails.

ISOLINUX loads fine, but then it just stops with a blinking cursor with any option besides memtest,and booting from the hard disk.

Kernel panic.

Kernel panic, probably during decompression, since a decompression related error is visible before the panic.

Behaves pretty much the same as arch.

Takes some time loading stuff from the cd, but works quite well, i have a full install with xorg running.

Boots without any unexpected errors, install works, x may not work out of the box, i don't remember the results of my previous tests.

Boots, didn't try installing yet, but the setup script seems to work.

The bootloader starts, but fails to find any OS to boot.

Boots, mostly works even, but with some graphical problems, the screen is shifted down and right, and wraps aroud to the top, but not the left, also some wird flashes, mostly when moving windows.

Doesn't boot.

Just works, but my limited knowledge of DOS doesn't allow for much testing to be done.

Works, takes a good while to boot though. Since i never owned an amiga i'm kinda lost from there.

some workarounds

By taking the harddrive/ssd out of the Thinkpad and into another computer it is possible to install linux without any problems, using this "trick" i installed debian and antix. Once any linux distro is on the drive that can be used, for example to install Gentoo, like i did using antix, and might do again. This workaround didn't seem to work for Haiku, and i didn't try it with ReactOS since compatible hardware is rare.

The trick that i ended up using quite often now is to use a Bootloader on a cd and the OS on a USB drive. This way it is possible to install debian on the device.

last edited 2023-01-01