LincolnBlogs

I think one of the things that is going to help me post a bit more this month is my ThinkPad T23. This was my most favorite laptop some 4 years ago maybe and the display just stopped working one day. I held onto it for a few months and then landed my new job and moved where I pressed it into service as a server to run my home computer infrastructure. It performed admirably under Ubuntu 6.04 and 7.04 for some 2 and a half years hardly being touched until I recently replaced it with some real server hardware.

Sunday night, I finally dug the thing out from the shelf underneath my TV for the first time since I initially set it up. I blew the dirt, hair and dist off of it and, just for giggles, opened up the lid and hit the power button. To my complete surprise, the display fired right up and my old Ubuntu 7.04 server started coming to life. Don’t ask me why the display started to work after 3 or 4 years, but hey, when in Rome right?

I decided to take advantage of the moment and I grabbed for my Mint 7 cd and ran a quick install. I figured I was going to have to format the computer sometime anyway before I threw it out or gave it away and this would allow me to play a little. Well, in no time I have Mint running on this little beastie and it looks and runs very nice! The only real problem I have is that the pcmcia network card I have does not seem to support wpa. This means I will have to find a long ethernet cable somewhere in order to play on it. Bummer.

The great part about this, though, is as long as the display keeps working, I can use this as an excuse to play with a bunch of different Linux distributions and post the results here!