Strange Symphonies The whole is greater than the sum of its parts

IBM 600X

Well we all know after a while, computers just completely conk out. Be it hardware failure, or the operating system. My younger brother's friend ( Vincent ) laptop has just came into this dilemma. Its an old IBM 600X machine, with an upgraded harddrive ( which he took ) so I got the original stock harddrive, with a staggering size of 6GB. Well Vincent said he was going to purchase a new laptop, so I told him if he was going to throw away the old one I'll gladly take it.

Thus at this present moment in time it is in my posession. But I fear he had not asked his dad if I could have it, so I told him to ask his dad. I know I may get him into trouble, but it would be less trouble than if I had just taken it without him knowing.

Were' not looking at a beefy laptop here, it only measure at 500Mhz Pentium 3, 6 GB harddrive, no network port, 1 usb, and 64mb of ram with 2 free slots.

When I first got my hands on the machine, I put in my SysRescueCD just to see if GNU/Linux would load, and it did. More than happy. Also checked out the harddrives health status with S.M.A.R.T. and it gave me an error. Crap. But it reported the error as "Old_age", so from there I just decided to continue. I had to first upgrade the BIOS, and I knew that to update the BIOS you need to run a program in Windows ( yes there are other alternatives, but I didn't want to try em out ). So the first thing I did was attempt to install Windows2k on it, and update through it and reformat. But trying to install Win2k was a bitch. During the "parition the hard drive" part it would always hang at either 9% or 45%, so I took my SysRescue CD and formatted there, and still no work. After that I just nuked the harddrive, and then it worked. During the nuking I got some weird DMA errors, which I believe could be the cause to Win2k not getting past 9% or 45%. Also after awhile in Win2k it would juts freeze, weird. During the update of the BIOS, I was reading the available help, and it would also freeze there. Not a pleasant situation.

So I upatedd the BIOS and proceded to install GNU/Linux on it.

My first choice was Debian, but this machine did not have any network ports! Only PCMCIA, and one USB port. Oh boy, so believing Ubuntu's "It just works" I decided to go ahead and install Ubuntu 5.10 Preview on it, and putting a "instantly work" PCMCIA card on it, so I can use it. During instlalation after getting to the partition screen, it would just hang. So I decided to continue with disabling dma, but still no luck.

So I decided to backtrack a bit and install Ubuntu 5.04 and that worked. Of course it took long to install, and get to GDM. But after logging, gnome wouldn't load. I believe this is due to the limitations of the 64MB of ram. I borrowed my friends network card, and put ndiswrapper on my thumbdrive so that I can try upgrading the machine. Sadly enough the machine didn't read my thumbdrive. But I know the USB port works because I used it to transfer the new BIOS to the machine.

So from here on, I'll try to find an available network card and with it, install fluxbox or another light window manger. I thought of getting a wireless network card, because then I have use for it with my R52, as a ethernet card wouldn't be to helfpul. So at Lowyat, I asked around for wireless cards where you can attach an antenna, and all that came up was a Compex or Senao. I tried setting up the Compex at the spot, but I was unable to, partly because I didn't know how to! But running lspci at least told me that it existed. But either way the guy was out of stock, and I had no word if Vincent had asked his dad yet. So it's time to play the waiting game.

I hope to gain acquisition to this new toy, and play around and hack with it. Overall I can just use it as a small file server, and http, but I don't really expect much out of it. Borrow it to my dad if he just want's to surf the web or something. But the only thing is, I have no experience with light window managers, mainly I have used Gnome and KDE, and if there is anything similar to those, yet lighter, I would be happy. Peter has lent me an additional 128MB ram chip, but the machine doesn't seem to detect it and gives me a 255 error. The ram slots dont appear to have the 'clicking' sound you'd tradditionally get, so maybe it's lose.

On Monday I'll have to give it back, so I am going to go format the harddrive, and be happy with this small endeavour.