Need Help Installing Linux on the TP750Cs

["Peter C. Olsen" <pcolsen@n2ell.columbia.md.us>]

I'm looking for help installing Linux on a TP750Cs.  I've been
trying for about three months.  I'm having a terrible time and
absolutely no success.

I first tried to use the Slackware 2.3 disks right out of the box
--- setting the "floppy=thinkpad" parameter along the way.  I
would then be able to bring up the "setup" program and begin
installing disks.  But the installations were never successful;
sometimes "setup" itself would hang, other times I would load all
my disks (60?) only to have the machine hang soon after I tried
to run some application.  (The most common error seems to have
been some sort of swapper failure, although there have been
others.)  I've done this about two dozen times, with all the
permutations I can think of.

Then, two weeks ago, I discovered the "tp-bare" boot disk on the
net.  Unfortunately, I can't get this to work, either.

I'm a literate Unix user and I've installed Linux on several
other computers, but I seem to be missing something critical
here.  I suspect (hope?) it's due to the 2.88Mb floppy (I can
never get the boot display to say anything other than "1.44", no
matter what bootdisk I use.)  The machine used to run OS/2 quite
well (until I repartitioned the disk), so I suspect it's my
fault, not the hardware's.

Please feel free to flame me with "RTFM" --- just as long as you
tell me where to find TFM and what sections I should R.

Thanks for your time.

Peter