Have you lost your marbles?

[reddragdiva]

arkady and I went to Dorkbot last night. We managed to get lost on the way — the fecking 69 doesn't stop at Stratford bus station, it passes somewhere near it — and got in literally five minutes before it finished. Bugger! Though we spent a nice chunk of time getting a rundown on the evening and talking geek with wintrmute and lusciousa. And I drank three cans of Grolsch in an hour. Must be marnameow's training.

Limehouse is a Docklands area that hasn't quite been renewed. It's straight British science fiction: the disused library, with the big chain on the gate and the statue of Clement Attlee out front. Limehouse Town Hall, which looks abandoned but isn't. Press the button marked "BOXING CLUB" to go up to Dorkbot. Sweeping through dusty, junk-filled halls in our leather trenchcoats. Upstairs to a room where someone is talking about a clock powered by a Marks and Spencer prawn sandwich. (With mayonnaise.) It's like a random snatch of hirez ramble brought to life.

A couple of weeks ago I took delivery of two more Compaq AP400 Personal Workstations, one with two processors, for the explicit purpose of testing FreeBSD 5's SMP. Tuesday I got around to retrieving a hard disk from Arkady, so I set about installing the bugger. Rough plan: SMP box as my main workstation, old box to have 5 installed and to be used as a file server, third box to have Red Hat Enterprise 3 installed to play with.

After loading it with all the memory I could (768MB) and booting from floppy, I spent a few hours downloading and installing huge swathes of operating system and software. Then I rebooted. And it didn't work. I then recalled minusbat mentioning to me, when I took delivery of my first AP400, that, being Compaq, you need to format them with the Compaq utility and put the diagnostics as the first partition of the hard disk. Or nothing will boot, ever. Important FreeBSD Lesson Relearned: on a system you've never seen before, do a minimal install and check the damned thing reboots before proceeding.

So I've been offline since Tuesday evening and have just plugged the old box (FreeBSD 4.6.2!) back in to catch up on LJ and email. It's running much the same. Except it now has 128MB and thrashes like a lobotomised flatworm. Majestic, I believe that's the euphemism the Lisa engineers used.

Update: IDE channel 0 is not working and channel 1 is misbehaving, in such a way that the Compaq diagnostic diskette throws up its hands in horror. I'm wondering if this box is installable at all, or a source of parts ... I'll try W*nd*ws on it first.

Comments

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

The things being presented at the Dorkbot I went to were incredibly widely varied... as you'd expect from their brief I suppose. The 'net radio guys I saw talking were very interesting... the guy who made 'music' from random bits of garbage and a haxxored speaker cone, less so. Still, it was bizarre enough to make me want to go again as and when opportunity presents itself...

[neenaw.livejournal.com]

The 69 bus is especially irritating because it stops at Stratford station going one way but not the other.

[sbp.livejournal.com]

Marna doesn't drink Grolsch.

Alex did one of the presentations - he works at the desk next to mine!

I've never had a problem putting Linux on a Compaq 360 G2 or G3 and vaping the original partitions.

[reddragdiva]

It definitely involved drinking lager in your lounge!

I think the problems are actually certain citrus-flavoured aspects of this particular machine, and I'll probably swap the dual processors and most of the memory into my old (known working) box.

I expect we'll see you at all future State 51-hosted Dorkbots ;-)