On Sun, Mar 1, 2009 at 11:09 AM, Bart Schaefer barton.schaefer@gmail.com wrote:
I've found an old IBM OmniBook 800 and am curious whether I can get it going again. (Currently it boots either Windows 95 or some then-contemporary version of Slackware.) The CDROM is external (SCSI, I think) and the machine won't boot from it, so it'd require a boot floppy. Any suggestions? Or is CentOS entirely the wrong Linux to be thinking about for this?
Its hard for us scavengers to do, but sometimes the better question is: Is this hardware worth putting Linux on?
First I couldn't find an IBM Omnibook but I found HP ones...
http://www.gbnet.net/~richard/digital/omni.html
Basically, the system is pretty low end and maybe would run CentOS-2.1 or 3.9 but would be pretty much pushing it to do so. The hardware is circa 1995 or so and would probably want something from the Red Hat 5.2/6.2 days versus even CentOS-2.1.
Long term you are probably going to want a different OS like Damn Small Linux as the Omnibook looks like it hs 64 or less MB.
http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin/forums/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=8;t=20595
Most of the time, I find that the batteries are going and non-replaceable so I find that sending them to the computer recycling center better than trying to put something on it.