From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu From: Don Message-ID: <8f6cf824.0204221851.61651a27@posting.google.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit References: , <200204221620.RAA17496@cthulhu.dircon.co.uk> Subject: Re: [9fans] An old laptop Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2002 09:09:35 +0000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 79da7ad6-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > 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/