Re: [9fans] An old laptop

[Don <north_@www.7f.no-ip.com>]

> 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?
>
Well, it seems u are interested in graphics. However, you could always boot
Plan9 over an ether connection via a boot disk and use another machine's
file server capability. Also, utilize a CPU server for ur work. This would
eradicate the confining hard disk space u have as well as the lacking CPU
power. The only compromise, really, is the necessity of running without
a windowing environment. Though, with ed and the usual plan9 command line
functionality I don't really see the overall disadvantage. I, personally,
will take another box however I can get it :)

> 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.
>
With a boot disk u don't need to install it, just boot it via the floppy. Your
only issue would be hacking up a boot disk that uses Xircom parallel networking.
I know lanl has a Xircom PCMCIA driver, but, I do not know how much
functionality Xircom has layered from the actual device interface. Maybe
coding up a parallel driver wouldn't be too hard?

I hope you give it a try ;) Would be nice to see it work
Don
http://www.7f.no-ip.info/