10 Feb
2000
10 Feb
'00
9:40 a.m.
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 (including
> the kitchen and bathroom) is to buy some old 486 laptops with color displays
> and PCMCIA slots. I've got PCMCIA ethernet cards for them, and am shopping
> for PCMCIA sound cards. My plan is to run Linux or FreeBSD on them, and
> X-windows,
Be warned, while you can run Linux with 4M of RAM, installing Linux with
4M of RAM isn't easy. It took me the better part of a day to install Linux
on a Toshiba T1900C with 4M RAM and 120M harddrive (a half-baked manual
installtion of RedHat using Tom's Root/Doot disk and an existing RedHat
system) and a 3Com modem/ethernet PCMCIA card (and it's currently hooked
into the network at home).
The RedHat install requires 16M of RAM. The oldest Slackware distribution
I found (3.3) required 8M to do a floppy based install. 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.
If anyone is interested I can go into more details about how I installed
Linux on the Toshiba (in total spent about three, four days trying to get
*anything* installed on the box).
Sounds like great fun. Personally I'm hooked on
touchscreens though.
Haven't got it working yet because cheap deals on touchscreens always seem
to come with caveats...
At the Miami Ham fest earlier this month, I came across this one table
where the guy was selling a prototype Linux PDA. IBM made these touch
screen computers (basically they look like a thich LCD screen and are jet
black) with a stylus. He slapped a 1G harddrive and installed Debian Linux
on the thing. To Linux it looks like a standard PC, but it was a (I think)
33 MHz 486 with 8 or 16M RAM and a 1G drive. He wanted $250 for it.
Tempting, but decided for the Sun 3/80 at another booth.
-spc (The Toshiba has a BogoMIP rating of 9.96. Woo hoo!)