How To Masterbate On The Bus

Baslini wandering soul: the pleasure of saying "I did it!

What is forwarded in 2010 with a pentium ONE 8/16/24Mb of RAM (in the sense that at every boot he sees a lot different ...), 1 GB hard drive, no bootable CD-ROM and PCMCIA network card combo? "A thing!" "Too old!" "Obsolete" .... We were wrong! That glorious machine can still do a lot!
Beyond the sentimental value of the object in question got in his head "to understand what you can do them, and examining my daily activities I realized that very often use a terminal window to access, interface obviously characters, via ssh to a remote server.
Bingo! To work!

For starters let's see what's on this machine: Dos 6.22, basic installation without cdrom support. Mmmm, whereas you can not boot from cd this is not a good start but let us not break down. Digging through the maze of memory I remember one time on this notebook ran Windows 95, and had also experienced (Successfully) a Linux distribution, I think an old slackware. Optimism is growing, now let's see what the market offers. To begin with a less steep roads could be installed Windows98SE, prepare a boot floppy with CD and throwing it from the setup. But here is making its way one of the problems "collateral" as a load material on a floppy since my latest machines are equipped with readers? Re-bingo! Of the garage! It has the floppy! The installations will be a bit '"clammy" but it can work. Returning to the OS to install the idea of \u200b\u200bstaying in the Microsoft world as not always pleases me especially, Let's see what the world offers linux / os alternative to chest dinosaurs of computing. The recent distro, also in superminimale, below 128/256MB ram does not move even to push them. The minidistribuzioni requirements such as DSL are still too high (around 64Mb). But here's the hat (actually, to be honest, a kind user on a forum ...) exit BasicLinux3 ! We then look at the description on the official website:

BasicLinux is designed specifically for old PCs. It uses a small kernel and busybox to Provide Low-RAM in Linux, capable of browsing the web, doing email, and Functioning as an X terminal. The current release of BasicLinux is Particularly Suitable for old laptops - it has PCMCIA capability and includes MagicPoint (a presentation tool similar to PowerPoint).
The current release of BasicLinux is 3.50. It comes in two versions: one boots from a DOS harddrive, the other boots from floppies. Both versions Have Themselves to the option to install a Linux partition on the harddrive.

to work! Download the images and prepare a floppy drive, I boot a few clicks the system is installed! How do I connect online? Look at the documentation (very light), unloading the module for the pcmcia 3com nic, a small change to a fie setup and go! The light of the "connection" between the microconnettore on RJ45 PCMCIA card and begins to flicker brightly.
It took several days to receive an indication that I bring to this type of solution, and eventually it took half an hour and no one to put it up .... and everything runs like clockwork! see the network perfectly, surf the Internet, runs the ssh server, sees the network resources, a meravigliaaaaaa!!
Before you throw an old pc think about it a thousand times, indeed, think before you call your "old"!