(somewhat off topic... only 5 or 6 years old and a PC at that :-)
Well as I mentioned in that screenphone thread I bought an IBM 730T.
There are lots of them on ebay right now at prices which make me wish I'd
not bought that ill-fated DTR-1. This is a tablet type pen-based computer
which has 8 megs RAM built-in, 3 PCMCIA slots and 1 RAM card slot which
collectively take up the space of 2 type-III slots. So if you put in a
hard drive you have 1 type-II slot and 1 RAM slot free. (I don't know
if the RAM slot is what is known as type-I, but the pins are arranged
differently and it takes a DRAM card... I'm hoping those cards are
interchangeable regardless of manufacturer but I'm not sure. IBM intended
a 4 or 8 meg card to go in there.) When you turn it on, there is no
BIOS setup screen that I have found, it just immediately proceeds to load
DOS off the 105 meg hard drive that came with it. Mine came with nothing
other than command.com loaded on it so I have no way of putting other software
on right now. Floppies for them are rare and expensive. I tried borrowing
a coworker's laptop last night to transfer software to the hard drive, but
I couldn't make it show up in any of WinNT, FreeDOS or Linux. So I will
have to either buy a floppy or a PCMCIA card drive for a desktop PC I guess.
I want to try and put Linux on it and get X working with the pen. So if
any of you have any of the following for sale or trade:
PCMCIA hard drive with more of DOS installed so I can use intersvr at least
or Linux
a clever substitute for that
PCMCIA slot for a PC
floppy for the 730T
other ideas on how I can try to install Linux
... let me know. I have quite a significant pile of junk^H^H^H^Htrading
stock. Hmmm, matter of fact I think I'm going to go add a list of stuff
to my home page right now because it's accumulating fast and I need to
start losing some.
I don't know even if I get Linux onto it, if the fact that DOS boots without
any card services being installed, implies that Linux will also see the
hard drive as an ordinary one or if I'm going to have to build a kernel that
has the PCMCIA support compiled in rather than as modules. I'm beginning to
wonder if the hard drive itself is special. Since there is no BIOS setup
could I get it to boot from a different sized drive... and maybe also
this accounts for why the hard drive didn't look normal to the other OS's.
--
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Received on Thu Feb 10 2000 - 23:09:56 GMT