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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