On Sun, 2 Oct 2005, John Nall wrote:

> I'll take a look at it.  So far as what I want to accomplish, I am primarily 
> experimenting with an old laptop which I was going to throw in the garbage, 
> but thought I might as well try and salvage, if I can get some sort of OS 
> running on it.  Right now I am trying to get Slackware 10.1 to load on it, 
> and so far so good (fingers crossed).    If it will run some version of 
> Linux, then I'll see how it might make itself useful on the workbench.  :-) 
> John

FYI I have an old b/w i386 33 MHz (!) laptop with 8MB ram that I use in 
text mode for serial and parallel controlled projects. It connects to 
the home network through another computer using hard wired serial PPP 
(115kBauds). It is small and light so it has survived nearly 10 years 
(with cheap no-name AA NiCd cells replacing the original battery cells 
every 2 years or so and the obligatory display hinge fix).

It is useful for all sorts of serial and parallel control projects, and 
as a 'slave' computer controlling hardware. It even runs X if one is 
very very patient. It can connect to the internet using a pcmcia modem.

I originally put Slackware on it, then later an older version of SuSe. 
It works fine. It has no cdrom at all and only an external pcmcia 
floppy. The way I installed it was, I booted from 2 floppies (typical 
'old' Linux boot), installed partitions on the hard disk and then used 
minicom with its zmodem to transfer a distribution's packages via serial 
link (overnight) from another computer onto the hard disk. Finally I 
installed from the hard disk.

Peter
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