Hi everyone!

Wanted to share today’s journey revived-and-tweaked ThinkPad T60 (1951-CZ1). It was a rollercoaster of OS trial-and-error, but the end result on this 20-year-old machine is incredibly satisfying!

1. The OS Journey & Trial/Errors

• Garuda Linux / Heavy Arch Distros: Tried booting heavier Arch-based distros like Garuda first — total failure/freeze due to the 2 GB physical RAM limit on the Intel 945GM chipset.
• Vanilla Arch Linux (Bootloader/ISO): Booted into the Arch ISO install media (see setup pic!), but setting up a lightweight environment from scratch while maintaining low memory overhead proved too tedious for a daily reader setup.
• The Winner — antiX Linux 23 (Debian 13 Trixie base): Flawless out of the box, extremely lightweight, uses Runit/SysVinit instead of heavy init systems, and stays under ~250 MB RAM usage at idle!

2. Pushing Software Optimization to the Limit (2GB RAM Cap Solution)

Since the 945GM chipset caps usable RAM to around 2 GB, I pushed Linux memory tuning as far as it can go:

1. ZRAM Swap: Configured 1 GB of compressed ZRAM (zstd) with priority 100 as the first line of defense.
2. Expanded Swapfile: Created a 3 GB dedicated swapfile (totaling ~7 GB virtual memory combined with ZRAM).
3. Kernel Tuning: Set vm.swappiness=20 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure=50 to favor physical RAM & ZRAM compression before touching the disk.
4. TLP & Battery: Calibrated battery thresholds (40-80%) via tp-smapi for power management.

3. Display & Aesthetics (The Rice)

• Display: 15" SXGA+ (1400x1050) FlexView IPS panel — absolute perfection for reading scans, comics, and terminal work.
• Terminal Environment: Alacritty + Fish shell + Starship prompt + Fastfetch.
• Theme: IceWM with Dracula GTK theme & Papirus icons.
• Eye Strain: Redshift configured for night reading (redshift -O 4500).

4. Fastfetch Specs

Plaintext
OS: Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie) x86_64

Host: 1951CZ1 (ThinkPad T60)

Kernel: Linux 6.6.119-antix.1-amd64-smp

DE/WM: IceWM 4.1.0 (X11)

Shell: fish 4.0.2

Terminal: alacritty 0.15.1

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo T5600 @ 1.83 GHz

GPU: Intel Mobile 945GM Express

Memory: 1.27 GiB / 1.92 GiB

Swap: ~7 GiB (ZRAM + Swapfile)