Nortel modem-terminals/display phones

From: Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner <spc_at_armigeron.com>
Date: Thu Feb 10 17:40:42 2000

It was thus said that the Great Shawn T. Rutledge once stated:
>
> On Thu, Feb 10, 2000 at 03:59:26PM -0600, Bill Richman wrote:
> > in them. What I've decided to do for terminals around the house (including
> > the kitchen and bathroom) is to buy some old 486 laptops with color displays
> > and PCMCIA slots. I've got PCMCIA ethernet cards for them, and am shopping
> > for PCMCIA sound cards. My plan is to run Linux or FreeBSD on them, and
> > X-windows,

  Be warned, while you can run Linux with 4M of RAM, installing Linux with
4M of RAM isn't easy. It took me the better part of a day to install Linux
on a Toshiba T1900C with 4M RAM and 120M harddrive (a half-baked manual
installtion of RedHat using Tom's Root/Doot disk and an existing RedHat
system) and a 3Com modem/ethernet PCMCIA card (and it's currently hooked
into the network at home).

  The RedHat install requires 16M of RAM. The oldest Slackware distribution
I found (3.3) required 8M to do a floppy based install. Don't even attempt
to run X if you have less than 16M and even then, you going to have to use
an older window manager like twm or fvwm/fvwm2.

  If anyone is interested I can go into more details about how I installed
Linux on the Toshiba (in total spent about three, four days trying to get
*anything* installed on the box).

> Sounds like great fun. Personally I'm hooked on touchscreens though.
> Haven't got it working yet because cheap deals on touchscreens always seem
> to come with caveats...

  At the Miami Ham fest earlier this month, I came across this one table
where the guy was selling a prototype Linux PDA. IBM made these touch
screen computers (basically they look like a thich LCD screen and are jet
black) with a stylus. He slapped a 1G harddrive and installed Debian Linux
on the thing. To Linux it looks like a standard PC, but it was a (I think)
33 MHz 486 with 8 or 16M RAM and a 1G drive. He wanted $250 for it.
Tempting, but decided for the Sun 3/80 at another booth.

  -spc (The Toshiba has a BogoMIP rating of 9.96. Woo hoo!)
Received on Thu Feb 10 2000 - 17:40:42 GMT