I took the 486 laptop apart. It seems it wasn’t PCMCIA slots like I was hoping, but the older pccard slots.
Which I think means I have no chance of getting USB or wireless cards for it. The hardrive is a regular 2.5″ laptop hdd though so that could be replaced with a larger one if required.
Posted by akaDruid on 30 Nov 2005 at 08:11 pm
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I’ve got the my old 486 DX100 laptop running in Linux! It’s not actually installed yet, but it runs from a boot floppy KNOPPIX-style.
First stage was to pick up a copy of DSL Embedded RC2 (48M) and the DSL RC2 boot floppy image from the DSL site and RaWrite to create the boot floppy. With the laptop booted into Windows 95, I was able to copy all 3 files over the Laplink cable, create the boot floppy on the laptop (None of my other 3 computers have a working floppy drive…). After some serious work with Google I was able to discover the key combination to get into the old Phoenix BIOS (CTRL+ALT+S). Semes that back in 1996/7 they’d not thought of the idea of showing the key combination during the boot sequence. Armed with the correct combination, I was able to set the boot device to the floppy drive. First boot failed with the message ‘boot failed’ (thanks for that!) but after recreating the boot floppy it worked. Using the default boot settings, it attempted to boot X, but gave up after some 15 mins, having got no further than a pale blue screen and a cross shaped cursor. It dropped back to a fully functional console which was promising, so I made a couple more attempts using different startup options (available by hitting F2 and F3 at the boot prompt). Finally, I tried ‘lowram’ as the at the boot prompt, and made some good guesses in the subsequent ‘X Setup’ menus. This produced a functional if slow X desktop.
Peformance varies between slow and staggeringly slow using this method. I’m hoping that an install to the harddrive will speed things up a bit. decompressing stuff on the fly is a task only barely in the reach of a 486. It takes around 2 mins to open an X term, and I’m still waiting after >20 mins for it to start XPaint so I can take a screenshot. During the startup I cautiously specified 8 bit colour which makes things nearly unreadable, so I plan on restarting in 16 bit colour before doing a hd install, which should leave me with some usable settings.
If I can get the laplink cable working in Linux then I shall try and get it online too…
Here are some links I found useful:
Posted by akaDruid on 26 Nov 2005 at 12:11 pm
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After quite a few years of watching the web, you get pretty jaded and very few things manage to really impress you any more. Pandora is one that really blew me away. Plug in your favourite artist or whatever takes your fancy and it will play a bunch of related tracks. It’s astonishingly accurate and makes finding new music incredibly intuitive.
It might be old news but I just discovered this on Andrew Wooldridge Dot Com
Posted by akaDruid on 17 Nov 2005 at 11:11 am
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I started downloading DSL embedded for the 486 laptop just now. And discovered that my blog is the only one of the 21.3 million sites on Technorati talking about 486s. That’s sad.
Posted by akaDruid on 16 Nov 2005 at 09:11 pm
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Something is odd in the state of Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5. I was writing an email earlier today and left Thunderbird open. When I returned, I saw this:
I have no idea whether this is the real 1.5 Final or another RC or beta, but I’m intrigued (I’m easily intrigued), and so I start the download…
Read More »
Posted by akaDruid on 16 Nov 2005 at 08:11 pm
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Part ship, part submarine, this astonishing shop can capsize and right itself on demand!
via pasta and vinegar » The weirdest research lab structure
Posted by akaDruid on 14 Nov 2005 at 12:11 pm
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I have created a ‘Mycroft’ plugin for the search box in Firefox which searches Flickr’s Creative Commons ‘By-2.0′ pool by tag. This is a search I would find pretty useful, finding Free photos to use elsewhere. If I get around to it, I shall create plugins for the other licenses too.
You can try it out by clicking on this button:
Or if you prefer, you can install it from the Mycroft page on the Mozilla ‘mozdev.org’ website.
Not sure I like the icon. Here’s how it will appear when installed:
After I created the icon, I wondered whether ‘Attr.’ or something would be better text.
Posted by akaDruid on 14 Nov 2005 at 10:11 am
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Robot lawyers? It’s not as good as it sounds – don’t expect mechanical monsters to stalk the courtrooms, making human lawyers extinct. It’s merely a misnamed software agent developed for a website, designed to produce legal advice at with even higher margins for said law firm.
From the story…
Next year the Buys legal firm will introduce robotic rivals to its human staff. The company is developing 3 robots, Stacy, Dave and Nathan, to provide online legal opinions and advice to its customers.
Read the rest here: we make money not art: Robot lawyers set for trial against humans
Posted by akaDruid on 14 Nov 2005 at 10:11 am
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Shortest post ever: Click here to create your own Web 2.0 company idea:
You’ll be a millionaire tomorrow!
Posted by akaDruid on 11 Nov 2005 at 02:11 pm
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In my usual spirit of “If it’s not broken, tweak it until it is”, I installed a spellcheck plugin, which disappointingly didn’t work, and this one, which works fairly well:
and allows quick insertion of flickr images like so:
Only problem is that the following error appears at the top of the bar:
Warning: Missing argument 1 for http_request() in /usr/local/lib/php/HTTP/Request.php on line 209
Posted by akaDruid on 11 Nov 2005 at 02:11 pm
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