12 Feb
2000
12 Feb
'00
1:25 p.m.
On Thu, 10 Feb 2000 18:40:42 -0500 (EST), you wrote:
It was thus said that the Great Shawn T. Rutledge once
stated:
We received the first "batch" of Compaq 486/50's I bought (24MB RAM, 384MB
HDD, TFT active color display, two PCMCIA slots, built-in trackball) along
with a couple of PCMCIA ethernet cards (IBM), and it turns out that FreeBSD
works *great* on them; just loads up, detects the ethernet card, installs
over the net and runs. They work great for browsing the 'net and for home
control stuff. I've spent most of the last couple of days fishing cat 5
cable all through the house. Now we can even surf the net from the
bathroom... ;-)
-Bill Richman (bill_r(a)inetnebr.com)
http://incolor.inetnebr.com/bill_r - Home of the COSMAC Elf Microcomputer
Simulator, Fun with Molten Metal, Orphaned Robots, and Technological Oddities.
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).