IBM Thinkpad 600E

The IBM Thinkpad 600E is an older laptop released in 1998.

Installation notes
If you've had linux installed on the computer before, then chances are you already have a swap partition on your drive. Activate your swap as soon as possible, you may have as little as 32 megabytes of RAM at your disposal.

The way I partition my drive was like this:

As with most linux distributions, you'll want to get a connection to the internet as soon as possible. If you cannot get it at install time, use a USB key to transfer the stage, portage tree, and distfiles.

Memory
Some kernels (or would it be GRUB?) have trouble recognising memory above 64 meg. You could use 'top' to see how much RAM is there, and you could try passing "mem=130496K" or similar to the kernel at boot time to specify the amount of RAM you have. Beware, if you want to use the DSP (responsible for sound and modem) then you need to leave 576 kilobytes for it.

Mwave Modem and DSP discussion
As stated above, the DSP chip robs you of more than half a megabyte of memory if you want to use it. There is a driver in the kernel for driving it, and userland utilities for initialising it/handling it etc.

Graphics
Well it's not that great a chip these days, but it works just fine. In the kernel there is a driver for it, and here are some snippets for config files you could use:

lspci output
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX Host bridge (rev 03) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX AGP bridge (rev 03) 00:02.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1251A 00:02.1 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1251A 00:06.0 Multimedia audio controller: Cirrus Logic CS 4610/11 [CrystalClear SoundFusion Audio Accelerator] (rev 01) 00:07.0 Bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ISA (rev 02) 00:07.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 IDE (rev 01) 00:07.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 USB (rev 01) 00:07.3 Bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ACPI (rev 02) 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Neomagic Corporation NM2200 [MagicGraph 256AV] (rev 12)

lsusb output
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001

Tips and tricks

 * The CPU is slow as. If you want to $ emerge -uavDN world &&emerge kdebase amarok firefox openoffice within a reasonable amount of time, see if you can set up a couple of distcc nodes. Myself, I might set up a couple of extra nodes and have something similar to a beowulf cluster.
 * You likely have a very small amount of RAM, meaning you use a good deal of swap in day-to-day work, slowing your computer down even further. Even with MAKEOPTS="-j1", some merges are slowed down a good deal by this. Look into using MTD to create a lightning fast swap partition on your graphics card memory (that's another 16 meg on my machine). And by all means, use the optimisation flag "-Os" for gcc (optimise for size, not speed - your binaries will be much smaller, meaning less RAM/HDD space is used).