10 Feb
2000
10 Feb
'00
10:31 a.m.
--- Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner <spc(a)armigeron.com> wrote:
It was thus said that the Great Shawn T. Rutledge once
stated:
>
> On Thu, Feb 10, 2000 at 03:59:26PM -0600, Bill Richman wrote:
> > in them. What I've decided to do for terminals around the house
> > is to buy some old 486 laptops with color displays
> > and PCMCIA slots.
I have had a similar idea, but for $200, I found a surplussed 486DX4 with
16Mb, a 540Mb disk, two PCMCIA, one ISA, all built into a wall-mountable
case with the LCD on the front. There is also an external floppy and
an IDE connector (once I've sussed out, the other I've passed on due to the
connector). It's ripe for Linux hacking, kinda like a laptop without the
battery or keyboard.
Be warned, while you can run Linux with 4M of RAM,
installing Linux with
4M of RAM isn't easy.
True. It's also possible to fit ancient Linux distributions onto 40Mb of
disk, but my record is 80Mb.
The RedHat install requires 16M of RAM.
Ask me if I run RedHat. :-)
The oldest Slackware distribution
I found (3.3) required 8M to do a floppy based install.
That sounds about right.
Don't even attempt
to run X if you have less than 16M and even then, you going to have to use
an older window manager like twm or fvwm/fvwm2.
Unless you _like_ to swap like mad.
I've been playing with Floppy-based Linux boxes, primarily derived from the
Linux Router Project. My smallest achievement is a 486SLC board w/8Mb, a
multi-I/O card (for parallel), a NIC, no video and a Connectix QuickCam.
After the kernel loads, the one script snaps a picture, converts it to a
jpeg and ftps it to a spot on my web page. No hard disk. I even found a
case the size of an encyclopaedia, thus no room for the video card. Total
investment, $25 plus the cost of the camera.
I've been thinking of a similar thing for the wall-mount 486: boot from floppy
(or flash - I have an IDE adapter for an ATA card) and use networked storage.
I could use the internal hard disk, but I want an appliance that I can turn
on and off without worrying about filesystem corruption.
Anyway... massively off-topic, but fun.
-ethan
=====
Infinet has been sold. The domain is going away in February.
Please send all replies to
erd(a)iname.com
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