heh. one floppy on a 233

honegod

honegod

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Aug 31, 2000
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for $.99 @ Goodwill I got a 233 K6 on a socket-7 with 16mb.
pci slots but no agp, a trident videocard.
fried harddrive. {I swapped in a 1.7 gig seagate }
CD player and floppy.

another $.99 got a 15" {measured diagonally by me ;) } color crt.

:D

I downloaded "Tom's floppy which has a root filesystem and is also bootable." linux, burned a floppy { a box of 10 floppies cost MORE than the computer WITH MONITOR !!! }

it's booted to a prompt, has been running for a day now, I typed some stuff I read on a FAQ and it looks like the OS recognises the HDD formatted fat16.

I am wanting to get an OS booting from the harddrive so the 5 year old can hammer on the keyboard and write colorful letters onscreen.

she is already impressed with the white letters on the black background, and I showed her about hitting the ENTER key every few letters, so while I study linux I am interested in seeing what she makes happen.

{she typed on my XP system earlier this week and invoked the 'disability' audio reader which proceeded to read aloud what she was typing into notepad :eek: }
 
have you tried booting to a live cd? if knoppix or damn small linux will boot from disk you can easily install to the hd from there. dsl would even leave you most of the drive for storage if you needed it.
 
the 16mb ram will severly limit what sort of graphical user interface you can run on that box

i would say something like Damn Small Linux is your best bet, since its a live cd, and it uses fluxbox which is a fairly lightweight wm

knoppix and slax will probably not even boot at all, since i believe 128mb is thier min requirement... kde would be absolutely unbearable with that much ram
 
Spleeze said:
the 16mb ram will severly limit what sort of graphical user interface you can run on that box

i would say something like Damn Small Linux is your best bet, since its a live cd, and it uses fluxbox which is a fairly lightweight wm

knoppix and slax will probably not even boot at all, since i believe 128mb is thier min requirement... kde would be absolutely unbearable with that much ram
Click to expand...

Knoppix will create a loop-back on a FAT drive for a swap partition, if you don't have less than 128MB, allowing it to run (though slowly).
 
whee !!

I got an aunt who has a fat pipe to download "Knoppix for kids" iso and burn me a CD. {being on 28.8 dialup STILL sux }

the 16mb looked beneath contempt, so I tried the RAM from a PII board that had been STEPPED ON.

it worked :D now running 192mb of crucial pc100

Knop boots now, but seems unhappy with the video, the $.99 monitor drops out claiming a bad frequency, something like 80mhz at 70hz ???
there is a screen that wants a 'video mode' setting with several choices like 80x50 and 80x30
no clue,

so I swapped to my 21" and I still get the mode setting request but the desktop DOES come up.


[size =really impressivly large}

I'm running linux !!!

[/size] {;)}
 
Raku said:
have you tried booting to a live cd? if knoppix or damn small linux will boot from disk you can easily install to the hd from there. dsl would even leave you most of the drive for storage if you needed it.
Click to expand...

the motherboard bios has NO boot from CD option, but the K for K CD has a boot floppy maker that worked to get the CD booting.

the harddrive appears as hda1
1.2gb, empty except for a 16mb .swp file.

I'll bet "easily install to the hd from there." involves LOTS of arcane typing . :eek:

thanks upriverpaddler I got Knoppix for Kids from your links and it has a NICE game for keyboard alphabet recognition ;)

Spleeze, you pushed me into hassling with the memory, THAT worked :D


tom61, there is a bit where the floppy looks at ram, with 16 it stayed BLANK and lots of error msgs followed ending at no boot.
the errors sounded "bad CD player"ish.
first I swapped the memory, and it showed 192 in the former blank, but kept the errors, so I swapped another old CD player in and THEN it booted the CD.
 
honegod said:
I am wanting to get an OS booting from the harddrive so the 5 year old can hammer on the keyboard and write colorful letters onscreen.

she is already impressed with the white letters on the black background, and I showed her about hitting the ENTER key every few letters, so while I study linux I am interested in seeing what she makes happen.

{she typed on my XP system earlier this week and invoked the 'disability' audio reader which proceeded to read aloud what she was typing into notepad :eek: }
Click to expand...

Hahah, You got a smart kid there. Just think she could be the software engineer of tomorrow.
:D
 
honegod said:
tom61, there is a bit where the floppy looks at ram, with 16 it stayed BLANK and lots of error msgs followed ending at no boot.
the errors sounded "bad CD player"ish.
first I swapped the memory, and it showed 192 in the former blank, but kept the errors, so I swapped another old CD player in and THEN it booted the CD.
Click to expand...

Hmm.. I've run Knoppix on a system with 48MB of RAM. It may have been issues with the boot floppy, or perhaps Knoppix has changed since then. Either way, it's good you got the extra RAM going in it, as it'd be slow running anything with that little RAM.
 
tom61 said:
it's good you got the extra RAM going in it, as it'd be slow running anything with that little RAM.
Click to expand...

I found a 256mb stick of pc133 and swapped it for the 64mb stick, hoping for 384 {256+128} but the bios only sees 256.
I guess I hit the MB limit :p

I'll check that the new stick isn't half burnt by pulling the 128 to see if I still have 256, if so I should be able to firewall the bios memory settings :D


I get the feeling that the OS sets the screen resolution higher than the vintage monitor can handle, it looks sweet on the 21".

but to check the screen resolution it looks like I have to be root.
which asks for a password
which I was NOT offered the chance to make during installation.

I read about "sudo passwd root" but I'd bet that it will ask for the CURRENT pwd, which I don't know :(
 
so far all I have running is the 1.2gig seagate.
I read that up to 2gig will fit on a CD with "transparent compression".
I read that there is 1.7gig compressed on the K for K disc.

so the harddrive is too small.

this might explain why there is no obvious way to install to the harddrive, the system could easily see that there effectivly IS no harddrive.

I WOULD like to see something like a 'greyed out' button though.:p
 
linooks are funzor :D

knoppix for kids makes a 200mb ramdrive, so the 250mb is about right.

I swapped in the brand new 250gig WD 8mb harddrive {slated for for DADDIES computer ;) } just for funzies. the MB bios won't see it, but knoppix had no problem. icons appear on the desktop for the three partitions I created with the WD disc included with the drive.

still no obvious way to put the OS on the HDD though. {no icon for THAT appeared on the desktop. }

it occured that the munchkin might want to play her music CDs and with the cd player full of K for K cd we'd need a second player.
no sweat, an antique mitsumi 8x plugged in as secondary master appeared on the desktop.

a pair of, you guessed it $.99 goodwill, JBL pro speakers and I am listening to "War Pigs" off Black Sabbaths "Paranoid" album right now. :cool:

the monitor wierdness is the only thing that is ugly so far, but I'm working on that ;)
 
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