Quoting me lyman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > So I _love_ Debian... and I have a Thinkpad 760ED from the real old > days just sitting there...
I'm writing this on a Thinkpad 365XD from the REAL real old days. :) > It has no working CD drive (works about 10% of the time). > It has no working Floppy drive (works about 10% of the time). > Everything else (screen, keyboard, battery, hard drive, ports on side > and back) is working (I think). > > It currently has Win98 installed (it boots and runs). > > I have a Linksys Etherfast PCMCIA nic but no dongle (any pointers to > where I can buy a dongle?). Ebay is your friend. Don't rule out the possibility that it could be cheaper to get a different NIC altogether. After paying $30 for the only non-cardbus PCMCIA NIC I could find new (at CompUSA), I discovered that it didn't work in FreeBSD (well, it would send.... just not receive). I found a well-supported (and probably better-performing) 3com NIC on ebay for less than half what I paid for the new (broken) card at the store. I'd say unless you know your card is supported under Debian and can find a dongle for less than $10 or so, you're probably better off with a different card. > I would _love_ to take the hard drive out of the Thinkpad, use an > adapter to connect it to my desktop's IDE cable, do a netinstall of > Debian onto the laptop hard drive using my desktops CD drive, Network > card, etc. - then put it back in the Thinkpad and have everything > working (including my Etherfast nic once I get a dongle). > > Is that possible or even a good idea? So just do it. You're going to anyway or you wouldn't have even bothered writing about it. :) All you need on the hard drive is something that will boot and let you use the network card. Once you have that you can do everything else from the laptop. > I'm guessing that running KDE might not be a good idea (if I could I > would). I wouldn't mind running EvilWM or some other light weight > window manager - I just want to have SSH, a graphical text editor > (yeah I could live with vi but I'd rather not), and most importantly - > I want a browser (obviously firefox). I ended up putting Win98 back on this laptop because X was just too unresponsive with the programs I wanted to use. KDE is definitely a bad idea if you have limited CPU and/or RAM. Xfce _might_ be lightweight enough.. try it and see. Give firefox a try. I had better performance with Opera, but I don't like it as well (and there are banner ads unless you buy it). > In the end if you say that I have to lose everything graphical and > just live with a command prompt.... sigh... well - it'd be better than > the current Win98. Take an image of the Win98 partition in case you ever change your mind or get rid of the laptop. You can definitely get your OS installed and have a good command prompt, and probably a usable lightweight GUI environment as well. JN ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
