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?
Bart Schaefer 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?
True, this is out of my league, and I'm just brainstorming, but ...
Does it have a pcmcia slot? Does anyone make a USB-pcmcia adapter?
Set up a usb stick to boot from.
Good? Or, am I totally off base? :)
Bart Schaefer 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?
What are you planning to do with it? Given the current prices on much faster/lighter laptops I'm not sure how much time you want to waste on an old one that isn't going to be a good GUI workstation anyway. If it boots from USB or a floppy that transfers bios control to the CDROM you can probably make the install work. Centos3.x might be more lightweight and efficient if you don't need current desktop apps.
2.1's support ends in a couple months.
The last time I tried to put a Linux on an obsolete box, it was on a computer with only 80MB of RAM. Pick an old enough distribution to fit that, and I had all sorts of problems getting a PCMCIA LAN card to work.
If I had got it to work, it would have been usable only as a proof of concept.
On Mar 1, 2009, at 1:31 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
Bart Schaefer 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?
What are you planning to do with it? Given the current prices on much faster/lighter laptops I'm not sure how much time you want to waste on an old one that isn't going to be a good GUI workstation anyway. If it boots from USB or a floppy that transfers bios control to the CDROM you can probably make the install work. Centos3.x might be more lightweight and efficient if you don't need current desktop apps.
-- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
On Sun, Mar 1, 2009 at 11:31 AM, Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com wrote:
Bart Schaefer wrote:
I've found an old IBM OmniBook 800
Sorry, thinko. I did of course mean HP.
What are you planning to do with it?
Give it to a child.
(I still think the pop-out mouse on that Omnibook is far superior to any touchpad or pointer "nipple" I've used since.)
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.
Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
Most of the time, I find that the batteries are going
True, but a laptop makes a good low-power server, appliance or terminal:
- Hook a Drobo to it, and suddenly it's a media server for your house. You just saved $200 by not having to buy a Droboshare.
- Does it have an RS-232 port? Those are all but gone on new laptops, but lots of professional equipment still has them. Install CentOS without the GUI and add minicom to turn it into a glorified VT-100.
- Install CentOS with X11 but without Gnome, and use it as an X terminal for remote *ix boxen.
- Same as above, but install VNC or the RDP client, and use it with your non-X aware remote boxen.
- Configure it not to sleep when the lid's closed, stick it under your broadband router, and set it up to accept ssh connections port-forwarded from the router. Configure your other home systems to sleep, but accept WOL packets. To get into one of your home systems remotely, you ssh into the laptop, send a WOL "ping", wait a bit for the machine to wake up, and ssh on to the internal machine. This is easily scriptable so you can run just one command to log in. You can thus save more energy, net, than not having the ssh/WOL box and keeping the big systems awake all the time.
Lots of things you can do with an underpowered laptop.
At Sun, 1 Mar 2009 10:09:47 -0800 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org 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?
I had no problems running WhiteBox 3.0 (same as CentOS 3.0) on a Toshiba laptop. It was a 586 box (P133), so I used the 586 kernels. I did have CentOS 4.3 on it at one point (but could not get the ISA-flavor sound card to work). It has 144meg of RAM and I put something like a 20gig hard drive in it.
If you have some sort of functional Linux install on it (even an old Slackware), and have a supported network card for it, it should be possible to contrive to do a network install, esp. if you have another box also running Linux and capable of running NFS.
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