[bkb]

Hello,
I just dug up a very old IBM laptop of mine, a 755C. It's a 80486 machine with 12MB RAM and 512MB HD. It was a mean machine in its day, but not anymore. It look me a couple Safe Mode & Scan Disks to get into Windows 95. Now that I'm in it's quite obvious that I have absolutely no use for it other that it being a dedicated Solitare machine. I'm considering donating it to charity but before I do I wanted to ask if anyone knows how I could learn anything form this machine. I've been reading about and exploring UNIX since switching back to Mac almost a year ago. A number of people here have said the only way to learn Unix is to jump in and get your hands dirty. On that note, would it be useful to try and install and configure Linux on his machine? If so could you point me in the right direction.

A couple issues:
1) The machine is painfully slow. Is it going to run the latest software. I'm not concerned about speed. But I don'y want to go version tracking.
2) It only has a floppy drive. I DO NOT want to start messing around with floppies. I do have a wireless/wired LAN at home & the laptop does have 2 PCMIA ports. Could I attach it to my network and format the HD and intall Linux through the network? How is this done? Or am i better off getting an external PCMCIA CD drive instead?

Thanks,
BKB.

[utidjian]

1) Yes... that machine will be painfully slow for any modern version of Linux also. I have a x486 machine with IIRC 8M or 12M RAM. You can load an older version of Linux on it like Red Hat 4.2 which is what I am running on mine. With that old a version though... laptop hardware support will be really spotty. It will almost certainly NOT support any network cards of a vintage more recent than RH4.2. If you want to run a GUI that will be incredibly slow... like 10-20minutes to load. So you will be pretty much stuck with CLI.

2) Well you can install from floppies... a LOT of floppies. But if you have a NIC that is supported by the version of Linux you want to install you should only need one or two floppies to get it started then install the rest over the network. 512M isn't going to be much room to play in though.

To sum up... Yes you can install Linux, it will run, you will most likely have to use an older version that can run with small amount of RAM, but a GUI interface is pretty much out of the question.
The "user experience" will not be spectacular (to say the least).

You might be far better served to pick up a cheap 800+ MHz machine with 256+M of RAM and some other more modern doodads and really have some fun. Then you could experience all that Linux has to offer.

[gbhgbh]

These old machines actually make excellent routers. Take a look at a few of the Linux and BSD Router projects.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5826
http://koti.mbnet.fi/~keiky/misc/lin...nx_router.html
http://www.rage.net/wireless/wireless-howto.html#toc2
http://mulinux.sunsite.dk/tiny.html
http://www.bsdrouter.org/
http://www.bsdnewsletter.com/2002/09/Features39.html