Mebbe not

[pseydtonne]

Again, it's been a while since I posted. Pittsburgh was fun, the wedding was gorgeous, I got to see a bunch of people I've been meaning to see for years, and the Penn Tpke reeks. C'mon, I'm in the middle of nowhere but there is traffic all around me for 170 miles. Why?

Turns out the owner of the 100 MHz laptop wants it back. "I'd like it as a terminal for the patio, maybe." I couldn't find FPM RAM even at the MIT flea, so it's still chugging at 8 meg and its hard drive space is too small for the replacement I found. Oh, and I found no battery. Beyond that, it'll make a fine... err... umm... dissection student. I'll bring it back to its owner and wish said owner the best. I could fix it, but it would take about a month of hunting and the owner wouldn't be able to do much with it once it does work.

I found lots of crap at the flea. Quake for Linux in a nice tin box! A socket screwdriver set for all those obscure screws I find in these laptops. Perhaps now I could make my dream come true and steal paintings from motels. The hardware geek in me looks at those screws with two pinholes instead of a plus or a minus and thinks, "must disassemble now!" I also realize this is a repressed OCD thing, but I hope some of you out there will admit similar feelings.

I'm working on a couple other computers at the moment. One needs a CD-ROM drive so that I can install Linux on it (someone was kind enough to partition the drive for me but getting material onto it... well, kinda tricky). Anyone know of a parallel-port CD-ROM drive?

The other computer is a normal desktop. However, that pup is just getting reformatted and having its main bits reinstalled. There is just too much adware, spyware, crackware and cruft for the present version of the drive to be salvaged.

How's everyone else doing?

-checking in before bed, Dante

Comments

[hakamadare.livejournal.com]

life is pretty good.

were i you, i'd abandon the parallel-port cd-rom project (bad juju!) and instead do a network install. run a ftp service (or a nfs service, if the machine you're installing onto has a tiny hard drive), create a bootnet.img floppy (or a pcmcia.img floppy, if you're installing onto a laptop), and there you go.

-steve

[pseydtonne.livejournal.com]

Ooooh! Could you email me about how I make a pcmcia.img file? This laptop has a PCMCIA NIC. Would I just build a boot floppy (and how do I do that?) or should I use Tom's Linux (which this thing likes a lot) and have it trigger? Where would I get good text on this kind of activity? Thank you!

-didn't mean to stir bad juju, Dante

[teddywolf.livejournal.com]

Doing OK, but only if I get max possible adjustment will I have hit goal. I'm not super-worried, if I don't hit it the difference is only about $140 or so before taxes. I'd rather hit it of course.

Of course, they put me completely opposite you in the call center.

Oh well. New month. Already units from people not putting in PC specs - even Hector. He apparently missed doing a quota template too.