on Thu, Mar 24, 2005 at 12:50:42PM -0500, Matt Price (matt.price@utoronto.ca) wrote:
> Ron Johnson wrote:
> >On Tue, 2005-03-22 at 09:18 -0500, Matt Price wrote:
> >
> >>hi folks,
> >>
> >>I've just inherited a 70 mHz 486 laptop with 24m RAM (!). It
> >>currently runs Windows 95. question: what can one do withsuch a
> >>machine? Any ideas out there? Anything would be great, but something
> >>educational would be great -- my 6-year-old would love a computer.
> >
> >
> >http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/applications.html is Debian-based.
> >
> >But since it doesn't have a bootable CD-ROM or UDB drive...
> >
> >Woody, booted from floppy and installed via CD-ROM, using the
> >fvwm wm and XFree v3.3.6.
> >
> >But, we can't give you any really good advice, since you haven't
> >told us important stuff like:
> >- how big is the hard drive?
> >- is there a floppy drive?
> >- is there a CD-ROM drive?
> >- is there a NIC?
> >- is there a PCMCIA slot (to put a NIC in)?
> >- which video chip is used?
> >
> lots of cool suggestions so far though. but to be more specific:
>
> - no nic (though could probably pick one up cheap for the pcmcia slot --
> though maybe it's the wrong type?
Make sure you get a 16 bit rather than 32 bit PCMCIA. You'll probably
have to special-order or get from an old-parts bin.
> - floppy & cd are external, don't know how well supported the interface
> will be.
My experience has been pretty good.
Since you're lacking both NIC and bootable CDROM, you may want to look
at SLIP/PLIP -- IP over serial or IP over parallel. The latter's
faster. If you can boot something like Tom's Root Boot, you can
bootstrap a chroot install as described in the Debian Installation
Manual (woody or sarge).
> - fairly large (3.2 gig) hard drive
> - um, will have to get back to you on the video chip
I ran a similar system as a PPP server / firewall (external serial
modem, PCMCIA NIC) until its HD died.
For console access, the system was usable, though response is pretty
comperable to shell access over dialup -- even at console.
You might have luck running this as a thin client as well, if you have
another system to run X apps to it.
Peace.
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
- Benjamin Franklin, 1755
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