Look at what I found in the trash: a working laptop

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)
640×480, 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:

Miscellaneous contributions from BL3 users

Other floppy-based live Linux distros:

Tomsrtbt

FD Linux

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.

I’ve written blog entries from some strange devices before …

There was a time when I was fascinated with the idea of using thin clients as actual computers.

My “first” Linux box, which spawned dozens of distro reviews and many hundreds of blog posts was a Maxspeed Maxterm thn client that worked so well as a stand-alone PC because it was basically a mini-ITX motherboard and small power supply crammed into a thin box.

I daisy-chained a few IDE data and power cables through a hole in the back of the thin client so I could hook up a CD-ROM and hard drive outside the small box. Adding a keyboard, mouse, monitor and 256MB stick of PC-133 RAM, I was ready to go.

At that point, the Maxspeed functioned pretty much like any other computer. Anything that could run on a VIA C3 Samuel processor could run on the box. That wasn’t everything, mind you, but it was enough to get by.

I’m thinking about buying a new test box — something cheap (I never want to spend more than $50 on any computer), probably in the Pentium III range, maybe a Pentium 4 if I get a deal.

That and the fact that the Daily News is moving a few blocks down the road to a new office, which has me throwing away massive amounts of paper and inventorying all the tech garbage I’ve accumulated over the past couple of years.

In one of my file drawers, I found an HP/Compaq t5300 533MHz 32/64 thin client that I got for about $10 on eBay.

I wanted to see if I could run Damn Small Linux or Puppy Linux on it, but once I got the thin client in the mail (hey, for $10 I didn’t do a whole lot of research on it), I pulled it open and saw that replacing the flash memory with something programmable would be difficult. It wasn’t made of off-the-shelf-parts like the Maxspeed.

But it did work. The 32MB RAM, 64MB flash, 533MHz box, with keyboard, mouse and monitor connected, booted to what looks like a Windows CE desktop. Included is a CE version of Internet Explorer (something from the IE4 era, I think), and enough utilities to enable me to set a static IP and get networking into the box.

Not every Web site looks pretty in a cutdown IE4, but surprisingly the thing can (almost but not quite) post an entry to Movable Type 4.1 with relative ease, even if it crashed repeatedly crashing the browser when I saved the entry.

At least it saved. And since the browser starts in about 2 seconds on this little, fanless and completely silent HP box, there are worse things than crashing the browser. I eventually crashed the entire thin client, but it does recover remarkably quickly.

I’d still like to get a thin client working with Linux, not as a quasi-PC with full hard drives but with nothing but solid-state memory. Once I finally get a new text box (I’m thinking something generically Dell or HP), I’ll use the Maxspeed in the way it was intended — almost. It’s flash memory is a CF card (and no, it didn’t come with the original), and I plan to install Puppy Linux on that CF card and run it as a silent workstation, perhaps saving my files on a USB flash drive (or on the CF itself).

Let me just say that in the days before I got my hands on two nearly free laptops, I had a lot of fun with thin clients.

The HP has built-in terminal software in addition to RDP and Citrix capability (I hardly know what either of those means), so I could use it as a non-X terminal (not terribly exciting) or try to sell it for what I can get on eBay (likely).

As for my new test box, I’ve seen quite a few promising candidates in the Pentium III and 4 range. I’d like something that can run 1 GB of RAM, but I will take 512 MB if necessary. I did see one with 1.5 GB capability. I have a pretty good feeling that a nearly 2 GHz CPU with 1 GB of RAM will run things very, very well when it comes to Linux and the BSDs.

I’ve seen some nice things for $60, but I’d rather part with $25, or get something for free. The latter has happened before, and it could happen again.

Forget the $100 laptop, these guys want to build the $12 computer

You heard that right. A team at the MIT International Development Design Summit thinks it can build a $12 computer to help kids in less-high-and-mighty nations learn the ropes of keyboards, mice, bits and bytes.

The project was inspired by … the $12 computers that are being sold and used today in Bangalore, India, as discovered by graduate student Derek Lomas:

A $12 computer of sorts – a cheap keyboard and Nintendo-like console – already exists in India, where people hook the devices to home TVs to run simple games and programs.

The idea has even more juice because the team wants to model these $12 devices after everybody’s favorite late-’70s tech marvel, the Apple II:

“My generation all had Apple IIs that we learned to type and play games on,” the 27-year-old said. “If we can get buy-in from programmers, we can develop these devices and give (Third World) schools Apple II computer labs like the ones I grew up with.”

In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux

In the battle for which operating system runs best on the $15 Laptop, Puppy Linux has pulled out front as the fastest system with the most features I need and best functionality on this 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt.

In case you’re wondering, here are the specs of the Compaq:

233 MHz Pentium II MMX processor
144 MB RAM
3 GB hard drive

I recently bumped the RAM from 64MB to the maximum of 144MB. Before this increase, running Linux or OpenBSD (which I have installed on the hard drive) with the X Window System was difficult at best.

Smaller applications like the Dillo Web browser, the Abiword and Ted word processors, the Geany and Beaver text editors ran pretty well in 64MB of RAM.

But the 500-pound gorilla of graphical applications is Firefox.

It would be nice to get by with Dillo, but many — if not most — of the things I need to do with a computer these days require a fairly modern browser.

Whether it’s blogging, working on Dailynews.com, or on the Movable Type back end, it all happens in the browser.

And for that I need, at a minimum, Firefox 1.5.

Now that Damn Small Linux offers Firefox 2 (under the name Bon Echo, but for all intents and purposes an early release in the FF 2 series), that system is more than fair game for use on this laptop.

Unfortunately, while the browser runs great, other things in DSL have not been working so well.

For some reason, the desktop wallpaper doesn’t work. Instead, I have a plain, gray X Window background. And while JWM (Joe’s Window Manager) is the default in Damn Small Linux like in Puppy, switching over to Fluxbox in DSL has been problematic. Some builds have allowed me to use the Fluxbox menu, but others don’t seem to work at all.

I could live without desktop wallpaper (or I could figure out a solution to the problem), but with Puppy Linux (I’m currently using version 2.13 but could easily upgrade to the newer 4.00 at any time) I get a nice-looking desktop, the Mozilla-based Seamonkey Web suite, Abiword (about as fast as DSL’s Ted word processor but with the added ability to read and write .doc files), the Geany text editor, the ROX filer and quite a few other applications I’ve grown to like very much over the year and a half I’ve been using Linux.

And as far as speed goes, Puppy and DSL are quite equal on this hardware.

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Coming up:

• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part IV — Wolvix Cub is surprisingly strong
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part V — Where I’m headed
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VI — Younger Puppies
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VII — Debian with Xfce and Fluxbox calls
• In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VIII — Final thoughts (aka “Why?”)

Wired networking for the $15 Laptop

Since I shocked it back to life, the $15 Laptop (1999 Compaq 7770dmt with 233 MHz Pentium II MMX CPU, 144 MB RAM and 3 GB hard drive) has relied on an Orinoco WaveLAN Silver 802.11b wireless PCMCIA card for networking.

The WaveLAN is truly a wonder, working in both my 1996 Apple Macintosh Powerbook 1400, plus just about every damn thing made thereafter, and it has served me quite well in the years since I fought and scratched for it on eBay.

But I don’t really have a lot of wireless networking in my life. My Netgear router used to pump out 802.11b, but the radio died about a year ago, and the router is now wired-only, where it continues to work wonderfully.

And at the Daily News offices, no WiFi penetrates the hallowed halls of Editorial, where all I have at my disposal is wired Ethernet.

The wide-open WiFi signals I sometimes “borrow” from my neighbors are weak at best and usually don’t work. The best WiFi I’ve tried is at the Los Angeles Public Library’s many branches, but I don’t have time to linger.

And the now-free WiFi for Starbucks cardholders works great with the Compaq in Linux but not at all on OpenBSD (I know this because OpenBSD wireless on this very laptop does work at the library).

So I’ve been contemplating purchase of a PCMCIA/Cardbus Ethernet card for some time. They’re cheap. But do they work on my ancient hardware and many and varied operating systems?

I picked up a TRENDnet TE100-PCBUSR 10/100Mbps 32-Bit CardBus Fast Ethernet Card last week and finally got a chance to remove the Orinoco WaveLAN card, insert the TRENDNet and give it a try.

It works!

The TRENDnet uses a tried, true and otherwise compatible Realtek chipset with the 8139too Linux driver.

I had no trouble loading the driver and configuring the card in Puppy Linux 2.13 (where I had to select the driver on my own) and Puppy 4.00 (where the system detected the card and correctly chose the driver for me).

So for the first time in the year or so that I’ve had the Compaq Armada 7770dmt, I have reliable networking for the aging but still sturdy laptop at both home and work.

The next thing I’m going to try is seeing if the laptop can physically accommodate the TRENDnet wired and Orinoco wireless cards at the same time, and if I can in turn configure both to work without having to pull one and plug in the other.

$15 Laptop note: The eight-part series on finding the right OS for the $1Compaq Armada 7770dmt is ready to run. All I need to do is get the entries into Movable Type and queue them up to run. I hope to do that in the next few days.

Computerworld tells you how to revitalize a laptop for $125

I really liked this Computerworld piece on how to revitalize a five-year-old Thinkpad laptop for $125.

While an IBM Thinkpad is worthier of restoration than most, the fact is that if you have a laptop on hand, a little maintenance can give it quite a bit of extra life.

Among the things Brian Nadel did to his Thinkpad R50:

• Added memory
• Replaced hard drive
• Reinstalled Windows
• Got second hard-drive caddy and installed Ubuntu on original hard drive so he can switch from Windows to Ubuntu by pulling and replacing the caddy
• Replacing a damaged keyboard
• Cleaning the inside, outside and especially the fan
• Defragmenting the hard drive

All in all, an excellent piece. And Computerworld is a great site. It’s going in the blogroll immediately.

Fresh DeLi Linux

It’s nice — really nice — to see via Distrowatch that development is continuing on low-spec favorite DeLi Linux. Here’s the release announcement.

I’ve been able to install DeLi on my VIA C3 Samuel converted thin client, but not without a few tricks that I picked up from the forums (here and here). And I also recently did an entry on some good DeLi-related blog entries from others.

I never was able to get my static IP configured in DeLi, but I think I could do it now.

According to the DeLi site, you need 32 MB of RAM to run the GUI version. The Web browser is Dillo, I believe, and that runs great in 64 MB and looks like it can run about as well in 32 MB.

Probably the biggest change is a shift from GTK+1 to GTK+2, which accounts for the memory requirements rising for this release of DeLi.

When you’re trying to resurrect and make an old computer useful, DeLI is a great distro to have in your arsenal, along with Puppy, DSL and even Debian (the Standard install with X and a lightweight window manager and your favorite apps added manually).

I just upgraded the $15 Laptop from 64 MB to 144 MB of RAM, and before the upgrade, OpenBSD, Puppy and Debian ran well on it with X … unless you try to run a “big” application like Firefox. That’s where Damn Small Linux leaped ahead of the pack for that low amount of memory.

Now with 144 MB, I hope that I will have more choices as to what will run on that Compaq Armada 7770dmt, but if you do have a box stuck with 32 MB (I used to run Windows 98 in that amount of RAM, and let me tell you, it was pure hell), DeLi is a great distro to try out.

Damn Small Linux does Movable Type

I can hardly believe that I’m composing an entry in Movable Type Open Source 4.1 using Damn Small Linux.

Now that version 4.3 of the low-spec Linux distribution has added Firefox 2 to its software mix, I can use the browser — here named Bon Echo for reasons that escape me — for many more things than I could the Firefox 1.06 browser included in previous incarnations of DSL.

And on the $15 Laptop — a Compaq Armada 7770dmt with a 233 MHz processor and only 64 MB of RAM — Damn Small Linux remains the best operating system and is that much better with a browser that can do so many things FF 1 couldn’t handle.

Like Movable Type.

And Google Docs, where I just had a very pleasant writing experience.

There are a few niggly things that don’t work as well in DSL 4.3 as they did in DSL 4.0 on this laptop, among them the desktop background, which for some reason is absent (but shows up when I run DSL 4.3 on other PCs), and I can’t for the life of me figure out how to get the menu to show up in Fluxbox. All I get is the DFM menu, not the Fluxbox application menu. Since I’m happy using the JWM window manager, that’s not a big deal, but having Firefox 2 instead of 1.06 is a big, huge, game-changing deal that makes Damn Small Linux a must have for hardware at this level.

Thanks to Robert Shingledecker of DSL for continually improving his distribution and saving many an old computer (this one in its ninth year of service) from obscurity.

I burned a DSL 4.4 RC1 CD today, but I couldn’t get it to boot on the Compaq. I don’t know if it’s a bad CD or a bug in the release candidate, but I do plan to try again as the development process continues. I’m also planning to give DSL 4.2 a try to see just where the desktop wallpaper stopped appearing on this laptop. Again, it’s not a big deal because the extreme responsiveness and stability and usability of this distribution on a PC with these specs cannot be found in any other Linux distribution — Puppy and Debian included.

When I make the leap from 64 MB of RAM to 144 MB, things could very well change. I might be able to more successfully run Puppy, Debian or OpenBSD with X, but DSL will also be that much better as well.

SCALE 6x: Good reasons to buy from ZaReason

Chief technology officer Earl Malmrose of the Berkeley, Calif.-based ZaReason and I didn’t just talk about the Everex Cloudbook.

Also on display were a $299 desktop machine and a few laptops (beginning at $899), all running Ubuntu 7.10, which ZaReason preinstalls and configures for its customers.

Why buy from ZaReason? I thought they just took off-the-shelf laptops and slapped Ubuntu on them, but they in fact have the computers made for them by ASUS, with final assembly and tuning taking place at their Berkeley headquarters.

And they’re doing the entire thing with 5 employees — final assembly, support, shipping. Earl said business is growing, and the company is set to open a site in in Germany to take care of its European Union customers.

Things are getting even more cozy for the company, which is close to the Fremont-headquartered Everex and now to gOS, which recently gave up its Wilshire Boulevard digs in Los Angeles for Berkeley to be closer to Everex.

Earl also told me that ZaReason is committed to rolling out its machines with the latest version of Ubuntu. When 7.10 ships in April, that’s what will go on ZaReason’s computers immediately.

So if you’re in the market for a new desktop or laptop computer and want it to “just work” out of the box, and you like the idea of a 1-year warranty backed by some pretty nice people, ZaReason is a great company with which to do it.

SCALE 6x: Good reasons to buy from ZaReason

Chief technology officer Earl Malmrose of the Berkeley, Calif.-based ZaReason and I didn’t just talk about the Everex Cloudbook.

Also on display were a $299 desktop machine and a few laptops (beginning at $899), all running Ubuntu 7.10, which ZaReason preinstalls and configures for its customers.

Why buy from ZaReason? I thought they just took off-the-shelf laptops and slapped Ubuntu on them, but they in fact have the computers made for them by ASUS, with final assembly and tuning taking place at their Berkeley headquarters.

And they’re doing the entire thing with 5 employees — final assembly, support, shipping. Earl said business is growing, and the company is set to open a site in in Germany to take care of its European Union customers.

Things are getting even more cozy for the company, which is close to the Fremont-headquartered Everex and now to gOS, which recently gave up its Wilshire Boulevard digs in Los Angeles for Berkeley to be closer to Everex.

Earl also told me that ZaReason is committed to rolling out its machines with the latest version of Ubuntu. When 7.10 ships in April, that’s what will go on ZaReason’s computers immediately.

So if you’re in the market for a new desktop or laptop computer and want it to “just work” out of the box, and you like the idea of a 1-year warranty backed by some pretty nice people, ZaReason is a great company with which to do it.