On Wed, 10 Nov 2004 09:35, Roy Britten wrote: > So, a charity with which I'm involved has given us the use of an old > laptop. Specs: > Compaq Armada 1520 > ?133kHz Pentium? > 32MB RAM > 1GB HDD > 1x FDD > 2x PCMCIA slots, empty > 100% dead battery > There's a base station it plugs into, with what looks like an ethernet port > on the back. > > Currently running Win95 (probably legally) with presumably pirated Office > suite. > > Linux: I'd much rather be running Linux than Win95. Googling suggests that > in the past people have had little success with Slackware and RH8.0. > tomsrtbt fires up fine, but I haven't had the time to experiment further. > I've been unable to establish communication with the home Mac through the > ?ethernet port. > > Anyone have experience with this or similar hardware? I don't want to > invest in a network card only to discover that I've added $100 value to a > doorstop. Well I suppose it all depends on how you define 'doorstop' A machine of those specs won't run any _modern_ office type software. otoh, it would run one of the lighter window managers such as fvwm [1] and probably Abiword. [2]
If you were to boot BG rescue [3], rather than tomsrtbt, you would be able to install an image of a runnable Linux and then use the chroot command to actually run it. The ethernet connector must be functional for this to work, or you'll need the patience of Job to fiddle about with umpteen doze floppies. 1. http://www.fvwm.org 2. http://www.abiword.org 3. http://omnibus.uni-freiburg.de/~giannone/rescue/current/ -- Sincerely etc., Christopher Sawtell
