avoiding installation woes

[Toni Kazic <toni athe wustl edu>]

Dear Savants,

I am contemplating purchase of one of two Thinkpad 560s for installation of
RedHat 4.2:

	E -- 166 MHz MMX
	X -- 266 MHz MMX

either with the proprietary IBM SCSI CD-ROM or a Sony 6X device.  Both
would have the Megahertz 33KB/10baseT dual modem/ethernet PCMCIA card
(XJEM3336 I think the number is).


I'd appreciate hearing of any experiences people have had (a) running Linux
on either of these MMX chips; (b) hardware incompatibilities with CD-ROMs;
(c) problems accessing both modem and ethernet functions; (d) anything
else!  


Having had problems with supposedly compatible hardware the last time has
made me a bit more wary, and I've found very little besides Kei's video
driver trauma experience in the archives.  I'll summarize responses and
post to the list.


Thanks for your help and happy Thanksgiving,


Toni