Recently in Linux on floppies Category
The highlight of the Daily News moving from its huge, windowless box to a smaller office has been all the old equipment that has been flying out the doors.
Aside from the Power Macintosh G4/466 (not a 450, as I initially thought), I plucked a couple of trashed-looking old laptops from the junk heap.
Neither had batteries or power supplies. Luckily, the power brick for my Gateway worked in one, a Compaq Armada 1125.
The damn thing actually booted ... to a Windows 95 desktop.
It doesn't look like a great candidate for Linux or BSD, unless you're taking pure command line or the barest X desktop possible.
The specs:
Pentium 100 MHz processor
24 MB RAM (the machine's maximum)
640x480, 16-bit color display
3.5-inch floppy drive
1.2 GB hard drive
PCMCIA telephone modem card
Windows 95
What's missing? Enough memory to do much of anything with, a CD drive, easy networking (although I might have an Ethernet card that works).
So what should I do with this thing? Clean it up a bit and see what the intelligent masses on eBay give me for it? Hey, the damn thing boots, which is more than I could say for a lot of gear I come across.
Note: The photo above isn't this exact Compaq Armada 1125, just a representative image plucked from the Web.
Update: Since all I've got is a floppy drive, I pulled my Linux-on-floppy discs and loaded up the two-floppy Basic Linux.
The Compaq booted, and after the second floppy loaded, I was even able to use X.
Among the applications I used during my test were vi, another text editor called wp (with pico keybindings) and the Links text-only browser, all in an xterm window.
I don't yet have networking up, but I'm working on it.
More Basic Linux:
Other floppy-based live Linux distros:
Installing a modern Linux or BSD system from a boot floppy. It can be done. I know that OpenBSD and NetBSD will do this, and I have half a mind to load OpenBSD on this thing if I can get the networking to go.
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Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
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