[9fans] An old laptop

[Digby Tarvin <digbyt@acm.org>]

Hello all,

I have an ageing Toshiba 1850C laptop, with 4Mb of ram and 160MB of disk.
Certainly not up to the task of running modern bloated operating systems
from Microsoft, and only able to run BSD Unix by omitting the graphical
environment.

The obvious question is - could it be gainfully employed as a Plan9
terminal server?

The challenge I see is that the only ethernet connectivity it has is
a Xircom PE3 (parallel port adapter). The alternative is to use a
parallel or serial based network connection (PLIP/SLIP etc).

Anyone tried a setup like this? Is the memory sufficient? I seem to recall
that small memory was a problem during the install process at one time.

Has anyone made a Xircom driver? Parallel network? Would a serial
network give adequate performance?

I can probably increase the disk size using something discarded from a
more recent laptop - I know the BIOS won't see the extra space, but
if it boots, a decent OS should.

Any other obvious problems.

Regards,
DigbyT
--
Digby R. S. Tarvin                                              digbyt@acm.org
http://www.cthulhu.dircon.co.uk