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From teh new to teh old!


Sparda

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ok, so this guy brings me this laptop, and asks "How can I get this connected to the Internet?". I stood there like o.O, "Where did you get that?". He said "I found it in a skip". So I laughed, and it was all good :D

Any way, it's too old for me to know exactly what to get for it in terms of LAN/WLAN expansion cards. It would also be nice if I could put FreeBSD on it as Windows 95 runs sllllloooowwww. Unfortunately the external CD-ROM drive that was in the bag with it doesn't seem to work, it open, and you can put CDs in it, but Windows doesn't seem to detect it.

In any case, there are a bunch of pictures of the thing (and the 28.8Kbps modem) located here: http://sparda.hopto.org/hak5/teh_old_lappy/

Any help on what kind of card that modem is and if any LAN/WLAN cards are available would be nice.

Any thoughts?

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It turns out that the slots on the side are indeed PCMCIA slots (despite not obviously been so).

Aquiering a 10/100 LAN card that works on FreeBSD should not be too hard. I am, however, more concerned about it's HD at this point. With a whoping 1.2GB HD, I'm concerned that I can even install enough of FreeBSD to make it web browser worthy.

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It turns out that the slots on the side are indeed PCMCIA slots (despite not obviously been so).

Aquiering a 10/100 LAN card that works on FreeBSD should not be too hard. I am, however, more concerned about it's HD at this point. With a whoping 1.2GB HD, I'm concerned that I can even install enough of FreeBSD to make it web browser worthy.

That should be enough. And if not there are many other very small Linux/BSD distributions.
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I am, however, more concerned about it's HD at this point. With a whoping 1.2GB HD, I'm concerned that I can even install enough of FreeBSD to make it web browser worthy.

That should be plenty, but even if it's not, you can replace those aswell you know. Should provide your customer with a nice performance boost as an added bonus, and is even likely to stretch his battery time a tad.

I can get a 40-gig laptop harddrive for 40 euros. 47 for a Toshiba one.

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So... I got it to boot the FreeBSD 4.11 floppies. :D

Unfortunately when it tries to load the kernel off the MFS disk we get the lovely "Going no where with out my init!" message. I suspect it's my own stupid fault for not:

1. Checking the MD5 of the files

2. Using the officially suggested floppy image writing tool (I used rawwrite instead of fdimage)

but it does genuinely boot the FreeBSD 4.11 floppies ;)

freebsd_kernelpanic.jpg

Origional Size

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