Possibly OT: FW: Vintage Laptops Wanted

From: Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner <spc_at_conman.org>
Date: Mon Jun 7 20:17:10 2004

It was thus said that the Great Tony Duell once stated:
>
> Obvious applicaitons (depending on processor speed and memory) include
> portable text entry (you don't need much processor power to run vi :-)),
> a portable terminal (something that I find very useful), if you have a
> CD-ROM drive, then running acrobat to read/display all the service
> manuals, etc that come on CD-ROMs (A laptop is a lot easier to balance on
> top of whatever you're reparing than a desktop machine), etc, etc, etc, etc.

  True, but installing software on said laptops may be a pain. I have a
Toshiba 1900C, with 4M RAM and a 120M harddrive. It took the better part of
two days to get some semblance of Linux installed on the system, since one
day was spent combing the Internet trying to find a Linux distribution that
would *install* (not run, *install*) with 4M RAM (the oldest Slackware I
found required 8M for install).

  I did get a system installed and it was a good test of Unix skills, but
it's nothing I want to repeat any time soon.

  Yes, I could have installed MS-DOS on the system (rather easily in fact)
but a) does SSH even *exist* for MS-DOS (not Windows, MS-DOS)? b) Cygwin
wouldn't even *fit* on the harddrive, much less run in 4M. c) I'm more
confortable with TCP/IP under Unix than MS-DOS.

  -spc (And it isn't all that fast ... )
Received on Mon Jun 07 2004 - 20:17:10 BST