The little laptop that couldn't quite.

[reddragdiva]

• Life outdoes notnews. Honestly, I wish I'd written that. And had been lying.

pcm1: at addr ? (1p/0r/0v channels) — the FreeBSD box thinks it can send sound out to the turntable, but not receive it. Cock.

Backup plans: (a) install something else on said box (requires dicking about with floppies); (b) find and press into service an ancient Thinkpad 560X as the host. Leengux on that with no GUI should be just fine in 96MB on a Pentium (I) MMX 233MHz.

I have two such laptops here: one Windows 2000 and one Debian Sarge. The latter goes straight into X and has a broken mouse (I lost track of it when our ceiling fell in four and a half years ago and just found it again today), so I'm currently doing Satanic experiments upon the Winders beast (not used in nearly four years). Windows 2000 in 96MB is as painfully slow as it sounds. Not to mention four years' security updates. VNC server, so at least I can do it in a window on this laptop. The USB hard disk works through the Pound Shop USB hub to the one and only USB 1.1 port. Next: try connecting the turntable.

(Where have all the cloverleaf kettle cords gone? Fucksake! I've had to nick Freda's for the moment.)

arkady has just sent an incendiary legal LART to the borough's educational authority regarding the older teenager's schooling. I am filled with admiration.

Comments

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Nota bene: Go help Mick Mercer. He's using a Windows 98 box.

[reddragdiva]

I sent him a CD of OpenOffice 1.1 a few years ago because it could export PDFs :-D

[oonh.livejournal.com]

silly entertainmentoids. whatever won't they think of next?

[txtriffidranch.livejournal.com]

Every time I figure that Skiffy senior management finally got treatment for its syphilis, I'm proven wrong again. By the way, do you still need that phone number?

[reddragdiva]

Oooh. Email it over, then. I can't promise crawling hordes of zombies, but we'll see.

[txtriffidranch.livejournal.com]

Here's the first: http://txtriffidranch.livejournal.com/277752.html Feel free to pass it near and far. If I don't get a response by Wednesday, then I post the next, and so on, and so on...

[rbarclay.livejournal.com]

Leengux on that with no GUI should be just fine in 96MB on a Pentium (I) MMX 233MHz.
fvwm2 or thereabouts will do Just Fine on such a box.

[reddragdiva]

Sarge has the good grace to default to twm ;-D

[heliumbreath.livejournal.com]

Which part of "no GUI" needs fvwm or twm? Kids these days; my boss keeps insisting that nobody knows how to use the commandline anymore, and I keep introducing myself as Nobody.

If you've got a NIC in that old box, then PXE can be a whole lot easier than juggling media, or if it's too old to do that, then at least loading only enough floppies to be able to pull in the rest from the network can help. I remember rebuilding SLS to that end, too many years ago.

Oh, and that whooshing sound over the shark tank would be the earlier-mentioned telly channel.

[reddragdiva]

PXEbooting would probably require a household server, which was the FreeBSD box. So the one with Debian locally will do.