On Tue, Apr 18, 2000 at 09:02:02AM +1000, Barrett, Peter G wrote:
> I Have an old DX2-66, hda=124Mb hdb=408Mb ESS soundcard and thought that
> rather than just dump it I could devote it to soundmodem AX25.
> Am I dreaming?
> If I'm not I would be interested to hear your ideas on the best best way to
> set it up, ie what to include, what to leave out.
> There must be a lot of surplus equipment similar to this and it seems so
> wasteful to just ditch them.
> Hams are noted for their resourcefulness, and Linux is noted for it's
> flexibility. Computers are noted for their obsolescence.
> What do you think.
I think it's a great idea although I don't know much about how much
CPU power the soundmodem needs. Let me know if it works, I might do
it too.
I continue to use 486's for a few chores... one was supposed to be the
"bedroom Xterm" but I find I don't need it for that very often; its
other purpose is to run my X10 controller. Of course all the machines
run distributed.net in their spare time so no CPU cycles are wasted.
Another 486 has a BIOS that's unusually friendly to weird IDE devices,
like my compact FLASH adapter, and my SunDisk adapter. So I use it
mainly for transferring data to and from those devices. Another 486
has a "vintage" slackware on it, since I have trouble compiling old
kernels on modern distros. I'm working on a low-memory setup for my
386 touchscreen machines, and libc5 with an old kernel seems to be the
way to go to save memory. And another 486 gets used for some Turbo C
DOS development I was working on for a while (another thin client idea
I had... if I succeed, even 286's might become useful again as thin
graphics terminals). It also is the only machine in the house that still
has Win95 on it.
So yes, there are plenty of uses for them, and I don't understand anybody
who'd throw out a 486, especially one with a DX2 processor.
I wish there was a good mechanism to get our surplus PC's exported to
poorer countries where they are scarce.
Just to keep it on topic... for several years my packet station and quite
a few other applications were all running on a 386. It would still be
more than adequate for those tasks but I'm running more stuff on my
gateway than I used to so now it's a dual Pentium 100.
--
_______ Shawn T. Rutledge / KB7PWD [EMAIL PROTECTED]
(_ | |_) http://www.bigfoot.com/~ecloud [EMAIL PROTECTED]
__) | | \________________________________________________________________
Get money for spare CPU cycles at http://www.ProcessTree.com/?sponsor=5903
