I plan to turn my one of my old Omnibook 800CT's into a "smart" wireless backup drive. It's not a lot bigger than one of the regular smart drives being basically an early netbook but its got enough grunt to act as an rsync server and also, at a push, can actually display most of its content. It's also much more configurable since it will have a local screen, and a proper OS.
Specs as follows:
I'm trying Damn Small Linux for this purpose - if it goes well then it will go onto my other lower-spec 800CT's which will become basically wireless X terminals.
First off, the Omnibook won't boot from CD. I've lost the SCSI and power cables for the Omnibook's own CD-ROM drive but I have a 10-year-old PCMCIA Freecom Traveller CDRW around (the old drive in it expired long ago but you can drop any slimline ATA optical drive in).
Specs as follows:
- CPU: P166 MMX
- RAM: 80MB
- HDD: 160GB IDE (BIOS only sees 8GB but that's not a problem for a sensible OS)
- Display: 800x600 16-bit 10.4" TFT
- Graphics: Neomagic 128ZV
- Dimensions: 28.2 cm x 18.5 cm x 4 cm
- Weight: 1.8kg
I'm trying Damn Small Linux for this purpose - if it goes well then it will go onto my other lower-spec 800CT's which will become basically wireless X terminals.
First off, the Omnibook won't boot from CD. I've lost the SCSI and power cables for the Omnibook's own CD-ROM drive but I have a 10-year-old PCMCIA Freecom Traveller CDRW around (the old drive in it expired long ago but you can drop any slimline ATA optical drive in).
- Download the DSL iso and burn to CD
- Download the DSL boot floppy image and rawwrite/dd to a disk (I used rawwrite since to 800CT still has an old Windows 98SE install on it.)
- Download the DSL pcmcia driver floppy image and rawwrite to another disk
- Boot from the first floppy and enter dsl frompcmcia at the boot prompt
- Insert pcmcia driver floppy when prompted
At this point we discover that the default Xserver doesn't work (nasty stripes all over the screen). Trying the boot prompt cheatcode xmodule=fbdev fb800x600 gets me a working display but the mouse is all over the place. So CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE out of X at this point and go for a command-line installation:
- Partition the hard drive using fdisk - I went for 512MB root, 512MB swap at this point
- sudo su gets to a root prompt
- dslinstall brings up an installation menu
- Select Install to hard disk
This works fine - swap is picked up automatically if mkswap has been run on the partition. Logging on tries to bring up X automatically but it's easy enough to kill the X server as above provided you selected the fb800x600 GRUB boot option on startup. The DSL Wiki suggests that the answer to the mouse problems is to use XFree86.dsl extension rather than the minimal X servers. To do this I need wireless networking up and running - there's an old NetGear MA401 802.11b PCMCIA card in the Omnibook which the installer picked up (cardctl ident confirms this) so it needs configuring (it appears as eth0 in DSL):
- iwconfig eth0 essid MYSSID key XXXX...
- ifconfig eth0 up
- pump (no, not dhcpclient or anything like that - thankyou, DSL Wiki, I wouldn't have got that one)
- mydsl-wget XFree86.dsl system
- mydsl-load XFree86.dsl
- Edit /root/.xserverrc and /home/dsl/.xserverrc to run the XFree86 server which means that the default DSL GRUB boot option will now work:
exec /usr/X11R6/bin/XFree86 -nolisten tcp - chattr +i .xserverrc (sets the file as immutable to stop accidental reversion to Xvesa)
Now the crunch - getting the configuration file /etc/X11/XF86config-4. For this, I started with an empty file and added sections until startx brought up a a reasonable uncorrupted screen. I'll post an annotated version later.
2 comments:
I just inherited a couple of these from a nice guy giving them away. I was going to be more blunt about my DSL installation by simply removing the HDD, plugging it into a desktop and doing the install from there (b/c my desktop CAN boot from cd).
However, I tried that same trick with an old i-opener I've also been working on, and getting WPA to work in DSL is a pain in the butt. They use an old 2.4 Linux Kernel which doesn't have the drivers for the Airlink AWLL3027 wireless usb adapter (the 2.6.x kernel DOES have the drivers). I got the drivers and tried to manually use NDISWRAPPER to get it going, but still couldn't get the darn wireless to work. I manually installed WPA_SUPPLICANT, but since I couldn't get the wireless adapter to work I was SOL.
I'm going to try to get an old PMCIA wireless card for the Omnibook. Hopefully it'll be easier to get going. With the network I'm on (I'm renting and my landlord owns the network), I have to use WPA. Other alternative would be to hard-line it into one of my desktops for a shared internet connection (with the desktop dumping out both as wireless).
I've really fallen in love with older hardware, since it's still amazing what you can do with it. DSL is by fire the breath-of-life for any really old hardware you want to use a GUI on.
Got to be careful, only the 166MMX 800CT supports Cardbus. The 100's and 133's are 16-bit PCMCIA only.
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