ThinkPad T40: it can still run modern Linux, for now

I recently busted out my old ThinkPad T40, the last of the OG IBM ThinkPads.

I picked it up some time around my university days because I liked collecting ThinkPads at the time, and it was a nice complement to my existing ThinkPad T60 and T430.

The battery is dead, but everything else still works. Checking a few online listings, I’m surprised that I can still find batteries sold for this model. Probably old stock that’s been sitting around in a warehouse slowly discharging to death, but hey, you might get lucky!

I also learned that I had replaced the internal IDE hard drive with a 16 GB mSATA SSD via an adapter at one point. I don’t think they even sell SSD-s that small nowadays, but the size feels age-appropriate.

I had already installed a flavor of Linux on this, but had completely forgotten the password.¹ This was a good excuse to wipe it and see if I can install a modern mainstream Linux distro on it.

I went with Debian 12 (Bookworm). It’s the newest Debian release, and unlike many other distros, they still offer 32-bit installers.

It had been a while since I had last installed Debian via the terminal user interface. The experience felt surprisingly snappy.

I went with the good old XFCE desktop environment. It strikes a good balance of being lightweight, simple and usable.

Things were great until I started up Firefox. It works, but man, is it slow. All the years of browser complexity have caught up with this laptop and made the web barely usable.

It does pass the techtipsy test.

This will likely be the last time this laptop runs a modern OS. 32-bit CPU-s are losing support both in x86 and ARM ecosystems, and the year 2038 is not that far away any more.

So long, and thanks for all the fish!