I am happy to report that slitaz is working very well on this old laptop. I had to make a few configuration changes to get things to work right and I thought I would post them here for anyone else that has an old thinkpad. These changes should work on several of the older model thinkpads, like the 600, 600e 600x, etc... basically the models with the difficult sound chip. If you have one, you probably know what I mean.
This particular 600e is a model 2645-3au Mfg 03/99. 294Mb RAM, 10Gb HDD
Booting:
I don't like to burn cd's, so I used plop boot manager to boot from usb. I created a bootable usb key using my new app DistrOS, which supports installing slitaz to a usb key or hdd grub2 installation (yes, that was a shameless plug.)
Video:
For some reason tazx doesn't alwaus update slim.conf with the chosen video driver. Makesure you install the neomagic driver and that it is listed correctly in slim.conf. 1024x768x24 doesn't work. I used 1024x768x16 by editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/70-Screen.conf and removed the 24 bit subsection. (I'm sure there is a better way to do this, but this was quick and easy. I'll study the xorg.conf.d scripts later nad possibly update this)
Sound:
Slitaz was easier than many distros in this regard. I only had to edit the /etc/rcS.conf file LOAD_MODULES line should read:
LOAD_MODULES="yenta_socket snd_cs46xx"
in other distros I have had to use the blacklist and modules.d configs to set the card correctly, but this was not necessary for me this time, once I unloaded the intel driver and loaded the correct driver it worked right away without setting the irq, dma, etc...
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With these small changes I have slitaz running on my 12 year old IBM Thinkpad 600e! Slitaz seems to be one of the fastest distros I have installed on this machine, and it is now the main OS on this 9+ OS multibooting machine.