Discuss Digest, Vol 16, Issue 10 --> Nostalgia &c.; plans

[nbodley at speakeasy.net (Nicholas Bodley)]

On Sat, 07 Jan 2006 14:14:44 -0500, Rich Braun <richb at pioneer.ci.net>  
wrote:

> Cutler's name appears all over another famous kernel out there, one he  
> wrote after leaving DEC.
>  (Can you guess the name?  Hint:
> like Linux, it's endured code-bloat over the decades...;-)

WNT?

===

<chat>

My first distro. was Xdenu, an early and obscure minimalist-tiny one from  
either Scandinavia or Finland (I think the latter). IIrc, the kernel was  
0.97, or some such. At that time (about 10 years ago) I had inherited a  
lovely H-P Vectra 386/16N with a buried short to ground in the motherboard  
on the parallel port's *RESET line. Careful taping of that contact on the  
printer cable connector, to isolate it, meant that Happiness Returned.

Vectra Mobo. is unpluggable (after unplugging the expansion riser, iirc).  
Removing one Torx screw frees up the big plastic camming handle -- pull,  
and you have it. Has a 52-MB HD, and I got it with 2 MB of RAM. (Was fun  
watching an AOL floppy try to install; thrashing between RAM and Swap  
meant that everything ran at about 1% normal speed. Took about a minute  
for a button widget's graphics to completely respond to a mouse click.  
After about an hour, it said I didn't have enough RAM.)

Later, upgraded to 8 MB of RAM. Fwiw, that machine maxes out @ 16 MB. When  
first introduced, that 16 MB of RAM cost a tad over $5,000.

Anywho, I tried muLinux (nice sense of humor!); wouldn't run. Fooled with  
Dragon Linux (faded...) and finally got more serious -- pruned DOS 6.22,  
freed up about 30 MB, and installed Debian command-line-only. I think I  
remember Hamm... Ran just marvelously, stable as bedrock in the Laurentian  
Shield. I decided to prune stuff that didn't seem necessary. Succeeded for  
a while, removing modules...

Fatal blow, removing an essential module, meant either kernel panic, or  
inability to tell me that there was kernel panic.

Fwiw, that's probably one of very few DOS machines anywhere that's set up  
for command-line codepage swapping for ISO-8859-[n], for [n] up to 10 or  
so. Has Kosta Kostis's replacement commands; Latin-1 is Codepage 819. Can  
work nicely with Icelandic or Turkish or Polish, for instance, just not  
all at once.

I'd probably tried a few other distros. in the meantime.  Still have that  
lovely Vectra; served as a monitor riser for some time until I was greatly  
blessed by some friends who found a DEC VRC21-WA in phenomenally-good  
shape (incl. BNC to "VGA" cable) on the curb. Best guess is that it's a  
Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 21TX.
Can't adjust purity completely; not sure why. Can live with that.
{end old-legacy stuff}

{newer legacy}
Later on, I bought a very nice used Deskpro 4000 (machine's name is  
"Desqpro"; long ago, I decided that if I ever owned a Deskpro, that was  
the name, and spelling, I was going to give it. Hopes fulfilled!). Bought  
128 MB/RAM and never regretted it. Orig. 3.2 GB, now 40 GB. Tried a bunch  
of distros, incl. SusE 6.4, several Mandrakes up to 10.0 or so, but  
finally settled on Libranet (slightly-modified Debian).

{near(?) future}
I have a more-modern machine, a low-cost Linspire TigerDirect Wintergreen  
box, ready to have a 200-GB Maxtor, Plextor PX-740A, and 1 GB of RAM  
installed. My place is so cluttered that moving operations to the new  
machine would be frightfully disruptive. Best friend says I'd better start  
using it before it becomes obsolete; I agree, and we're both only  
half-kidding. (Basically, it's an AMD Sempron 1.6 GHz in a typical tower.)  
Plans are to multi-boot, 98 SE for some old hardware with no WNT drivers  
and such, W2K to experience the joys of open warfare and (good)  
much-better i18n, and a few Linuces. I plan to keep Linspire, if only for  
the drivers (Linmodem, but I don't expect to use dialup, especially if I  
switch to Speakeasy VoIP) However, I expect Linspire + CNR to make life  
easy when I simply want to run apps. without doing research and experiment.

200 GB seems big, right now, but [with]in a couple of years, 1-TB drives,  
and even reliable ones at that, might well be affordable by Many Of Us.  
For now, I plan to set up a small bunch of partitions for various Linuces  
and maybe even FreeBSD (and Solaris?).

I give a lot of thought to which distro. will be my "serious", primary  
one; so nice to have all the choices available! Libranet is "on hold"; Jon  
Danzig most unfortunately Met His Final Time a few months ago, and his son  
Tal is taking a break overseas for a while. Sarge looks very tempting; I  
really, truly value Debian's stability; as well, its packages are a Major  
Blessing, almost always. Synaptic, as well, does very well for me. In all,  
I really doubt that I'd be sorry to commit myself to Debian.

Am also considering, in varying degrees, among others, SUSE, Mandriva,  
Xandros, and maybe [K]Ubuntu, although it did have some signif.  
disappointments.
Of course, Fedora Core would (or should) get some attention.
</kitty>

Btw, if a message such as this is excessively chatty/detailed, please let  
me know! "[off-list]" gets my attention quickly (even if the message is  
actually on-list... (^_^)!  )

Best regards, and a bright and shiny New Year to all!

-- 
Nicholas Bodley /\ @ /\  Waltham, Mass.
Sent by Opera e-mail in Libranet GNU/Linux 3.0
Good planets are hard to find.
Please be kind to this one!