Back in August, I received an IBM ThinkPad T41 with an ATI Mobility Radeon 9000; how can I get older (pre-2003) versions of Linux working on this machine WITH graphics/sound drivers?
Basically you need to install an older version of the ATI (now AMD) proprietary driver package for Linux. The older drivers are binary only, no source code, so they will only work with older versions of the kernel that they know about.
I had a Thinkpad 770 (9548-400) around 2002 which was (IIRC) a P200 MMX CPU. I successfully ran Mandrake 7.1 on it, but when I upgraded to Mandrake 8.1 it struggled a bit. I didn't note what graphics card it used but I used Xfree86 v3.3.6.
I recall Mandrake was quite user-friendly for configuration compared with other distros that were around at the time, when you had to do some real config work to get X running!
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Basically you need to install an older version of the ATI (now AMD) proprietary driver package for Linux. The older drivers are binary only, no source code, so they will only work with older versions of the kernel that they know about.
I recall Mandrake was quite user-friendly for configuration compared with other distros that were around at the time, when you had to do some real config work to get X running!