Floppy
Contents
Why bother?
Since we all want everyone to be able to use Linux on his or her ThinkPad of any vintage, it's important to cover all the technologies useful to making that happen. One of those technologies is the lowly floppy diskette.
On many old ThinkPads, it's the easiest, cheapest way to start installing Linux. Of course, you wouldn't want to install the entire OS this way even if you could.
History
Ages Ago
The oldest ThinkPads had built-in floppy diskette drives.
1.44MB HD Floppy
2.88MB ED Floppy
- 750/C/Cs/P (1)
(1) These machines need "floppy=thinkpad" appended to the Linux kernel parameters.
The Middle Times
IBM made an external 1.44MB floppy diskette drive that worked with many models of ThinkPads. If you get one of these, you can use it to boot quite a few models of ThinkPads. The drive will also fit in the UltraSlimBay found on the 600 series of machines.
Nowadays
Current machines do not come with floppy drives, but you can buy a USB floppy drive if you're feeling nostalgic.
Distributions
Several distributions can be installed by first booting a floppy diskette (or six) and then installing over a network. It can be a relatively painless way of installing an OS on an older machine. These distributions directly support such methods:
Other distributions can be coaxed into installing over a network, with a bit of work:
